The Magician’s Land by Lev Grossman

No Spoiler Book Review

This is the final book of the Magician’s Trilogy, which I have savored over the course of the last few years. I listened to all of these books on audio, narrated by Mark Bramhall, he did a fantastic job with a difficult book to narrate. These books required the narrator to be able to convincingly do accents from all over the world and to speak as gods and monsters would speak. The Magician’s was my favorite book the year that I read it, and the following two books were every bit as great!

This book follows the story of a group of tortured genius magicians on their adventures in this world and others. The characters are seemingly always in personal crisis. They are profoundly self-absorbed and mostly alcoholics, so the books can get pretty dark at times. However, there are times of wonder, awe and selfless sacrifice that creates a good balance for the story. What I really loved about this series is that it is full of sneaky humor, there could be something very tense and tragic happening and somehow the author finds a way to slip in a funny line at the exact right moment. I look forward to Lev Grossman hopefully, writing more fantasy in the future.

A note on the TV series. I watched the first season of this show and then gave up on it. The writers of the show, changed a lot about the book for no reason that I could make sense of. I like the actor that plays Quentin, but I don’t agree with any of the other casting decisions. My biggest problem was with the actress who plays Julia, to be fair the character is so complex and important that I don’t think many actresses could pull off the part. The books generally set a very high bar, so any adaptations were likely to fall short.
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