This review was originally written and posted in July 2018.

So from what I can tell this is about a depressed person with a superiority complex obsessed with books aimed at a younger age group who can’t stop causing his own problems.

Oh god, I’m going to be snarking myself, this might get weird.

We open the novel with Quentin walking down the street with his two friends, James and Julia. The other two are dating and The sidewalk wasn’t quite wide enough, so Quinten trailed after them, like a sulky child . Oh no, too real. -_-

Oh no, he’s got a crush on Julia. I don’t think I’m going to like this as much as I like his third-wheel feelings.

Her dark hair was pulled back in a wavy bunch. Somehow it made it worse that she was always nice to him.

…the hairstyle makes ‘it’ worse? I think that second sentence is supposed to be self-contained, or at least come right after the reveal that Q has a crush on her, but put together like this, I legit had to stop for a few seconds and puzzle out how her hair was making things worse.

Quentin did a magic trick. Nobody noticed.

[…]

Quentin did the magic trick again. It was a very small trick, a basic one-handed sleight with a nickel. He did it in his coat pocket where nobody could see him.

Does it count as ‘not noticing’ if it’s deliberately hidden? I mean, the connotation of ‘nobody noticed’ is one of ambivalence, the thought that they could notice they just weren’t trying to. But that’s not what’s really going on. Also, is it really a magic trick if it’s just…fiddling with a nickel in your pocket? I’m pretty sure that’s just fidgets.

James and Q are both going to see the same dude, they have appointments one right after the other. The narration informs us that Q, James, and Julia all know each other because they are ‘ridiculously brilliant’ and thus got sorted together in all the advance/gifted programs throughout their school years. The book turns the fact that they run in a small crowd into a lament about how Julia won’t sleep with Q.

Oh, yeah, I said it. The book. Not Q. Because this is 3^rd person narration, and I’m gonna be That Person and stick to my own made up rules about POV. 3^rd person limited can get pretty personal, sure, but the narration is still not the same as the main character’s thoughts, so if the narration is going to, apropos of nothing, inform us that Julia doesn’t want to bone Q, then that’s the book/author’s decision. Q already had his own moroseness in his thought process, and that part can be blamed on him, but this is aaaaaaall author.

I know the line between main character and authorial narration can get very blurry, but when it comes to questioning if a book shares the faults of its characters, picking up on the difference becomes important. A character can have all sorts of things running through their thoughts, and the narration can be skewed by the fact that it’s following the character, but the narration doesn’t have to lean in.

Also, because I skimmed the first chapter already and I know I’ll get to use this at least twice, let’s start a new counter.

“Pale” = Pretty Count: 1

Quentin was thin and tall, thought he habitually hunched his shoulders in a vain attempt to brace himself against whatever blow was coming from the heavens, and which would logically hit the tall people first. His shoulder-length hair was freezing in clumps. He should have stuck around to dry it after gym, especially with his interview today, but for some reason – maybe he was in a self-sabotaging mood – he hadn’t. The low gray sky threatened snow. It seemed to Quentin like the world was offering up a special little tableaux of misery just for him” crows perched on power lines, stepped-in dog shit, windblown trash, the corpses of innumerable wet oak leaves being desecrated in innumerable ways be innumerable vehicles and pedestrians.

1) I think you could make those sentences even longer if you really tried, book.

2) This, uh, speaks to me. Like it’s got a definite Guy In Your MFA feel to the word choice, but the overall tone is, uh, my last several years. Between this and the third wheel-ness I’m really into Q as a character.

The three carry on down the street, trading inside jokes which probably should make them seem like close friends but which just annoy me because I’m not in on the joke. (And no, explaining the backstory doesn’t help, it’s just tedious.)

Quentin knew he wasn’t happy. Why not? He had painstakingly assembled all the ingredients of happiness. He had performed all the necessary rituals, spoken the words, lit the candles, made the sacrifices. But happiness, like a disobedient spirit, refused to come. He couldn’t think what else to do.

Bah, get out of my head!

The book lists his accomplishments and all the things he’s got going for him, and I’m sure some people will think ‘man, what a whiner,’ because he’s got a good list going, but…that’s the insidiously horrible part of depression, it don’t give a fuck what you’ve actually done or not done.

Although being a depressed person without an impossibly high GPA does make me want to kick him a little. *shrug*

Q mentally drifts off as they walk, and we get a several pages long infodump about Fillory. It’s a magical land depicted in a series of five children’s books, written in the 1930s. Five siblings find a Narnia-like world and battle magical creatures, including a witch with time powers. They were extraordinarily popular, and Q is obsessed with them even still. (Which is not that odd, he’s only 17. The book presents this as being something absurd, but…he’s 17. He’s not 33-er, um, I mean…moving on.)

The Fillory books were both a consolation for Julia not loving him and probably a major reason why she didn’t.

They’re not. I can guarantee you, they’re not the reason. Also we’re still in the first chapter and I’m already tired of this overdone crush.

The book goes on a several page detour about how Fillory is ‘where Q escapes to in his mind’ and then uses the whole info dump to just tell us about their vague plots and how popular they were. But what does Q do/think about? Is he just…mentally reviewing the plots? Is he writing fanfiction in his head? Is he creating elaborate self-inserts? (Does his elaborate self-insert story change as he grows older so he can continue to insert himself into the world in his current age rather than having to imagine himself as a younger version? Just…uh, asking for a friend…) And that’s just the in-his-head stuff, what about the rest of the time? For being such a supposedly huge part of his life, we actually know nothing about how Q interacts with the books at this point. They were popular, he still likes them. Okay? Does he go to Fillory fan-cons? Does he harass people online with his theories? Does he talk about them constantly? Does he scour resale shops for merchandise? Does he obsessively campaign movie studios to make a film version since they’re film-izing everything nostalgic these days? (IS there already a film version, since these books seem to be taking the place of Narnia and we do have Narnia films in the real world?) We know nothing from this extended detour, and it ends up feeling like the book just couldn’t figure out how to transition to the next scene so it did a weird cul-de-sac instead.

The trio gets to their destination, and Julia parts ways so the boys can do their interviews.

If this were a Fillory novel – Quinten thought, just for the record – the house would contain a secret gateway to another world.

[…]

More than anybody else Quentin had ever met, James reminded him of Martin Chatwin.

Wait, so, is this supposed to be the result of his obsession? Just constantly comparing real world things to book things in an off-hand manner? Well, that’s…a thing. I guess.

They ring the doorbell but no one answers, so Q decides to just go inside the unlocked door anyway because he’s kind of an ass.

That James wasn’t coming inside suddenly made him want to go inside more.

I’m torn between like this and not. On the one hand, I have this knee-jerk rejection of anything that’s “character suddenly felt like doing something because we need to move the plot along.” On the other, he thinks this house looks like a fiction story which is the only thing he still feels interest in, and he’s trying to separate himself from a guy he feels inferior to due to said guy’s annoying goodness. I still don’t like the wording, though. Lazy, lazy wording.

Q even finds an old fancy cabinet and tries to poke the back of it to see if it’s real. (It is.)

Anyway, the guy they were meeting didn’t answer because he was dead. Dun dun dun!