“While each novel can stand on its own and conclude satisfactorily, Grossman has built a few essential worlds that help us understand fantasy and our relationship to it through through a progression of novels about people like us faced with the spectacular.”
Little jaunt to the underworld? Don’t forget your passport. The second installment in Lev Grossman’s Fillory series, The Magician King, continues to play with realist fantasy and the right amount of irony to meld the two. Quentin and his pals provide a sly and subversive fairy tale for grown-ups, with a caution: be careful what you wish for. You might get it.
In the tradition of Southern storytelling, Mary Helen Stefaniak’s novel The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia offers a window on the power of myth to transform one small town during the Depression. Leslie Clements explores how that tension between progress and tradition free the inhabitants of Baghdad, Georgia, for radical reinvention.
At the heart of Lev Grossman’s latest novel, The Magicians, lies the idea that a fantasy world exists, but one far more complex, and at times limiting, than Quentin Coldwater, the unlikely hero, might wish. Drawing on the rich fantasy traditions of Tolkien, Plover, and Rowling, Grossman subverts genre expectations in wholly original ways.
