The entire time he’d been at Brakebills […] Quentin had been holding his breath without knowing it. He’d realized only now that he’d been waiting for Brakebills to vanish around him like a daydream. Even aside from the many and varied laws of thermodynamics that were violated there on a regular basis, it was just too good to be true. It was like Fillory that way.

Getting real sick of hearing about Fillory, book. You need to fucking do something with that little nugget.

Lord knows you’re not doing anything ELSE to take up all this page time.

Next comes many pages about how Brakebills is totally awesome you guys (we promise, you’ll just have to trust us, not going to show it) and also long descriptions of the other three Physicals. Eliot is super duper smart while never studying and also quirky. Josh is perpetually disheveled and tries to make people underestimate him.

Janet’s parents were laywers, of the high-flying Hollywood-consorting variety, and colossally wealthy. She grew up in L.A. being babysat by various celebrities.

I, uh, don’t think that’s how rich people work? Or celebrities? Unless maybe nannying was a gig before they got ‘discovered’?

Janet’s description also includes an entire paragraph about her dating life and the exact, specific nature of her sexiness. Because that was needed.

Anyway, of course all of these personality traits had to be told to us. It’s not like any of this could be conveyed through scenes or character building or interactions with Q and Alice. Nope. I mean, did you see that dinner scene from last chapter, which was just many pages of “being an adult, as told by a kid”? I meant that literally, this book is not capable of conveying a character outside of info dumps.

Progress straight into more summaries about bland things from the school year, stuff like “Q went to more classes.” Not what’s in the classes, not what he’s learning, not how he feels or how he’s doing. Just…that he went.

They threw a party in honor of the fall equinox

Wait.

So.

Brakebills is about four months behind, weather-wise, from the rest of the world.

…or is it actually, temporally, behind the rest of the world? Do celestial events happen twice in this book’s world? Is the fall equinox actually happening again four months behind the first one, or are they just perceiving it as happening? Like starlight taking oddles of years to reach earth, are the heavenly bodies just hitting Brakebills four months later somehow? I…I don’t think much thought was put into this. (And honestly, I like the idea of them celebrating lunar/solar holidays in completely incongruous seasonal weather. That would at least do SOMETHING with the whole out-of-step facet, instead of just…apparently forgetting it’s there most of the time.) (But nope, Q mentions everyone enjoying the crisp fall weather during their bonfire, it is definitely seasonally fall during the fall equinox. Which, if it’s still Muggle-September, would be Brakebills-May. And if it’s Brakebills-September, would be Muggle-December. I’M SO CONFUSED.)

We get briefly introduced to Professor Bigby, who is a pixie. Which apparently means he’s a normal person, but has giant insect wings on his back. …okay.

It never stopped, the weirdness of this place. It just went on and on.

It barely even started and then instead of doing anything with it you stop to pat yourself on the back and then smash cut to a different scene.

“Thing X exists” is not a story, or even particularly interesting. You have to actually DO SOMETHING WITH IT.

Sheesh, if that’s all it takes, I got tons of random, unattached notes I can stitch together and claim is a book.

One day Q is tired in class and the professor asks him a hard question he can’t answer. Then Professor March kind of mildly embarrasses him until another student (Amanda) distracts him from doing that and the class moves on.

Q, apparently, thinks this is a grevious insult and decides to get ‘back at’ March by making his podium jiggle. This makes March fumble the spell he was performing.

Suddenly, a small man in a suit with a random branch floating in front of his face appears. He freezes time and…

…just

That’s it.

For literally the rest of the day.

It’s actually really boring. The narration tries to make it all creepy because he’s wandering around the room and puttering with stuff and breaks a clock. He’s all ominous and not quite human and such. But…it’s several pages of a silent man silently doing nothing. Sure, it would be creepy to live through it, but the narration is so focused on description over Q’s emotional state that I don’t feel like I’m living through it. Plus, everything before this has been just as boring, so I’m left with an impression of “oh great, even your bad magic doesn’t actually do anything.”

Amanda attempts to break free of whatever spell is going on, but she gets silenced again and then, ya know, more boredom of frozen people just sitting there.

Finally the man disappears on his own, and so does the spell holding everyone. The rest of the faculty had been trying to get into the room all day, but couldn’t through whatever spell had been on the place.

And it’s all just SO DULL. That was a whole extended sequence of long, dense paragraphs, followed by more long, dense paragraphs of summary about what the rest of the school did, with no variation or dialogue or ANYTHING. There was nothing to break it up or change the pace or mark it as different from the rest of the story at all, and I just really don’t get the style choice in this book to have everything be huge blocks of tame narration.

That evening after dinner, after the usual announcements about clubs and events and activities had been sullenly and desultorily attended to, Dean Fogg addressed the student body to try to explain what had happened.

But…why? Why would you even bother to talk about school clubs before you get to the big “scary” thing that happened? Why would it not be, like, a special assembly, or literally anything to keep kids calm other than just sending them to dinner like nothing happened?

Anyway, it’s the usual tripe this book likes to pull about how you shouldn’t try to understand anything because the universe is unknowable and seeking answers is pointless. I mean. Why even read this book if there are no answers and looking for them is a useless activity? It’s just…the boring version of nihilism, but occasionally magic is mentioned.

Fogg calls the stranger “The Beast” and he’s a being from a different world/dimension and that kind of happens sometimes and there’s no point in trying to figure out its motivations or meaning.

I think it’s trying to go for, like, Lovcraftian unknowable ancient horror, but it’s…really boring. Lovecraft at least described the fear his monsters inspired pretty well; this book just says “all pointless and IDK” and then moves on.

Oh, and also we get confirmation that Q’s little trick with the podium and the fumbled spell IS what brought The Beast out, so yeah. I don’t really mind that it happened, because hey, some people are assholes, and frankly the prank was in line with how mad Q was. In that, Q was only a little mad and it was only a little prank. Just unfortunate that something so slight caused a whole-ass Beast to show up. But also, Q…just hasn’t made a good decision yet. It’s hard to feel bad for him when it’s not a mischievous prank from a sympathetic character, it’s just another sign screaming “Whiney Mediocre White Boy can’t take not being special.”

Oh, also Amanda is dead. That’s just thrown in there on the last line of the chapter.