Later in the day, after being punched by Penny for no reason, Q passes out. When he comes to, the paramedic from the first chapter is taking care of him. She spouts some portentious stuff about death (the guy who died was just a coincidence, apparently) and how the manuscript will come back to him when it’s “time.” He goes under again and when he wakes up for good, Penny is there being cheerful.

As soon as Q asks Penny why he got all punchy, Penny acts confused and says he “had to” before the dialogue smooths out and it becomes a shouting match about how Q and Alice passed the test and Penny thinks there was some conspiracy between them and against him. Which I don’t really mind. It’s ridiculous, but the kind of ridiculous thing someone would actually think, especially someone as faux-edgelord as Penny. Probably the weird bit at the first was supposed to be foreshadowing, but with this book, who can fucking tell. There’s not enough dialogue in it to get a sense of what ‘normal’ is relative to this author’s skills.

Dean Fogg comes in to interrupt their shouting match and then turns his scolding into a heavy handed drop about how fighting with magic is dangerous and could “consume you. Transform you into something not human, a niffin, a spirit of raw, uncontrolled magical energy.” Yup, super natural place to drop that bit in.

“Listen to me carefully,” Fogg was saying. “Most people are blind to magic. They move through a blnak and empty world. They’re bored with their lives, and there’s nothing they can do about . They’re eaten alive by longing, and they’re dead before they die.”

I…don’t even know what to do with this. The whole ‘muggle world is dull’ bit is getting so heavy handed that it’s just bizarre. I mean, most likely it’s just the whole “make X look cool by presenting everything else as bad,” but turned up to 11. But when it’s up to 11 I just keep trying to make sense of it. Are all the wizards depressed (as has been hinted before) and there’s just no psychologists in this society so they assume that’s how the whole world is and don’t question it?

It’s just so fucking bleak.

They get handed down their punishments and then Fogg leaves.

“Penny,” Quentin said. “One, your hair is stupid. And two, I don’t know what it’s like where you come from, but if you ever do anything that could get me sent back to Brooklyn again, I won’t just break your nose. I will motherfucking kill you.”

1) Again, why do you want to stay here so bad when nothing good actually happens here?

2) Uh….bit of a tonal jump there, buddy.

3) Is…is there any indication Q is even capable of carrying through on this threat? He’s been a wimpy, sad, skinny nerd this whole time whose only skills are stage magic and moping. You can’t really expect me to think he’s a badass now, this late in the game, with nothing changed.

And then we spontaneously jump to six months later with Q and Alice starting their Third Year.

*blinking guy gif*

What even is the point of anything going on in this novel? I really don’t get it. All the time skips really compound the fact that there’s no goal or purpose or plot so far. Q just floats vaguely through a really boring school where nothing goes on, and entire years can be skipped with no consequences and so what is the point?

We’re 25% through this book and I don’t know what the plot is. I don’t think the book knows what the plot is.

Anyway, at the end of Second Year the kids got tested to see what Discipline they go to.

Most of the students, and probably the faculty, were ambivalent about the whole idea of Disciplines. They were socially divisive, the theory behind them was weak, and everybody ended up studying pretty much the same curriculum anyway, so what was the point?”

All I can hear is “I hate the Hogwarts houses, but they’re part of the formula so I guess I’ll include them.”

Which is weird, because this description works fine for personality-based houses, but doesn’t make sense for “areas of magical specialty” as was introduced last time. You’re making up this world, you can just have magic work that way and the divisions make sense. But this book doesn’t seem interested in actually creating things so much as just commentating on how other things are bad.

Alice called it her magical bat mitzvah.

Well, more rep than JKR ever put in, but again with using marginal identities to make limp jokes but nothing else.

Another note about how magic and electricity are fundamentally incompatible, my least favorite trope. Sigh. At least I recognize that I seem to be alone in this, so it’s not a kick at the book, but it’s my blog and I can complain about it if I want to.

Although it is odd that this book specifies that Brakebills was largely dependent on Victorian-era technology since that’s about the era when electrical do-dads and marvels were starting to take hold?

[about affinities] “it’s a very personal thing. It has to do with where you were born, and where the moon was, and what the weather was like, and what kind of person you are, plus all kinds of technical stuff that’s not worth getting into.”

[…]

“Why do we have to go through all this testing? Can’t you just figure my Discipline out from my birthday and all that stuff you must mentioned?”

“You could. In theory. IN practice it would just be a pain in the ass.”

1) What IS it with this book and insisting that the whys and wherefores aren’t interesting or worth thinking about?

2) Look, if you want testing to be necessary, then why claim it’s based on outside factors at all? Why can’t people just HAVE affinities for a certain type of magic? Harry Potter didn’t claim your house is based on your star sign, it’s just what you ARE and everyone accepts that because that’s FINE.

The professor testing him goes through a couple pages of doing weird things and declares him an unusual case, which Q takes with his usual morose pessimism assuming she means he’s a freak.

Unladylike half-moons of sweat bloomed under the arms of her blouse.

This book really likes to use ‘not fitting within my personal expectations of a gender’ as an adjective.

Also it’s something completely out of place in the rest of the scene. There’s no other physical descriptions, except one used to jab at the professor like this. It’s weird.

In the end he shoots white sparks out of his fingers, we are not given a clue as to what this means, and he’s marked down as “Undetermined” and sent home for the summer. His time at home, of course, gets summarized in the bleakest way possible, because how dare the real world not have…classes and fist fights? Friends that he’s had all of one scene with? He’s even bored reading his magical textbooks for homework!

Back and school now, Q and Alice get put with the Physical kids (yes, it uses the word kids, we’re supposed to be in college and yet everyone is KIDS, because this book wants to be YA so bad it just doesn’t know it). Alice got tagged as some subspecialty of Physical and Q is there because it’s the smallest group so they’ve got room for him for now.

Also apparently Physical is the “cool” group, but again, we haven’t seen these groups or the social atmosphere in general, so there’s really no way to tell.

Q and Alice show up for their first seminar but can’t get into the special Physical house.

For FOUR AND A HALF HOURS.

At the end of this absurd amount of time, they decide to use Alice’s light-bending abilities to burn down the front door of the house. Well, more like cut it in half with a…sun laser. That finally works and they’re able to open the front door.

Apparently all the other Physical kids were just waiting around inside for them, and getting in the front door is some kind of test. Q and Alice actually took OVER SIX HOURS and that’s about average. Which…seems really odd? All they had to do was physically destroy something that was durable. There wasn’t a reason (that we know of) why sun-lasering it worked whereas chopping it with an axe didn’t. Also, chopping it with an axe was the only other brute force thing they tried. And somehow this took SIX HOURS? And everyone else also takes around six hours to…just…destroy it really hard?

This is not clever and also I don’t get why it took six hours or why there’s even a test at all. Can you be kicked out of your Discipline? Do you become Factionless Freds? Is this just hazing?

There’s only three other kids in Physical: Eliot, Janet, and Josh.

(How big is this school, anyway? I honestly have no idea if this is absurdly small or not.)

Alice asks what the ‘right’ way to get in the door is, but there isn’t a right way, you just have to break it however you can.

Q trails Eliot around like a lost little puppy.

He didn’t seem at all embarrassed by the fact that he’d ignored Quentin for the past year. It was like it never happened.

Well…yeah? Why would he? You guys only hung out that one time because you were the only two at school. Beyond that, he’s got no reason to care about you. You’re different ages and in different years. There was never anything besides convenience and I’m not sure why I’m supposed to care.

Why is Q even so hung up on this kid? He’s ever bit as dull and incidental as everyone else in this world. “Disaffected nerd with parent issues and First World Problems” can be a character, but not when EVERYONE is also that character. At that point, it’s just background noise. That’s one of the biggest problems with this book. The overwhelming SAMENESS to everything.

We get a list of the other Disciplines, but it’s interrupted so I don’t know if it’s a complete list: Naturals, Illusionists, Knowledge, Healing.

Knowledge? Knowledge? How is that its own Discipline? Doesn’t everyone have to learn things? Do you…do magic with your…knowledge…but isn’t that just DOING MAGIC? Is it magic related to learning things, so you can spell yourself smarter? I’M SO CONFUSED.

Also the Healers have their ‘clubhouse’ be a clinic, which is weird. Doctors don’t hang out in the ER with the patients, they have their own breakroom. Or at least it could like a lab or something.

Eliot likes to cook and he’s making dinner for everyone.

“God, I love cooking. I think if I weren’t a magician, I’d be a chef. It’s just such a relief after all that invisible, intangible bullshit, don’t you think?”

At first glance I like this, and then I get really confused because they’re in the clubhouse for kids that did PHYSICAL MAGIC but everything he does is intangible???????????????

Also….can Eliot not be a chef? Is it…not allowed?

With a white tablecloth and two heavy silver candelabras and a wildly eclectic assortment of silverware […] the table in the library almost looked like somewhere you could eat. […] Eating a sophisticated meal, alone in their own private dining room, felt very adult. This was it, he thought. He had been an outsider before, but now he had really entered into the inner life of the school. This was the real Brakebills.

Oh my, I’m dying laughing because this is, like, the most teenager line I’ve read in this book so far.

They were arguing about what they would do after they graduated.

AND THEN THE ONLY THING TO GET TALKED ABOUT IS ELIOT’S BAD JOKE ABOUT BEING A MOUNTAINTOP HERMIT. Which is really irritating since we still have no idea what a genuine answer to this would be.

Then they just hang out and do stupid shit and drink a lot of wine. And that’s it. For, like, five pages.

So. Fucking. Adult.