Q gets into Fourth Year and all of a sudden we find out that all the Fourth Year students disappear for a semester and come back haggard and no one knows what happens when they go. Just…some out of the blue knowledge for you. We haven’t heard about it before, because there is no wider setting in this book. Q is not part of a society, does not have any contacts or interactions or curiosity. We can’t lead into anything like this because that would require Q to ACTUALLY TALK TO PEOPLE and omg people are just the worst can’t have that.

Because reasons, all the Physical kids are going on their trip at the same time this year.

(By the by, that whole “grabbing Alice and jumping in the water” random ass bit from last time was the end of the chapter and never gets mentioned and I’m still wondering why did he do that????)

We finally get a scene of the characters socializing and it opens with a homophobic rape joke. This fucking book…

So the fifteen kids going on the trip this time are rounded up in the middle of the night.

Everyone wearing identical navy blue Brakebills-issue pajams.

…is…is this a thing, like, ANYWHERE? This is a college for supposed adults and they have standard issue PAJAMAS?

JFC even the army lets me sleep in whatever pink polka dot shit I want.

Can’t even blame this one on Harry Potter because those kids got to be as rag-tag as they wanted a night so I just really don’t know what’s going on here.

The students are all lined up on the roof, transformed into geese, and then thrown off the roof.

And then we get a long backstory on some random chick named Georgia because this book DOES NOT KNOW HOW OR WHEN TO INTRODUCE CHARACTERS. Apparently Georgia told her parents all about Brakebills and they thought she was crazy so the dean had to do some mind-muckage magic on them. Which…implies the other parents didn’t need mind-muckage? They were all perfectly happy to let their children hare off in the middle of senior year to a school they’d never heard of?

????

Then there is a long, long dull bit about Q as a goose flying south over an undetermined amount of time, until his group reaches the south pole. (Or near enough to it.) Nothing happens on this trip, no trails or tribulations or discoveries or…anything, but we get pages on pages of wind currents and looking for landing spots anyway.

Everything about this book makes me go “what is the fucking point?”

Once they land at the spot where their magical instincts tell them to go, they turn back into humans.

Fifteen pale, naked human teenagers

Um. No? They’re in Fourth Year. Except for Q and Alice, everyone should be 22. And Q and Alice only skipped a single year, so they’re 21. 20 and the very least.

“You are at Brakebills South.”

Come on, it wasn’t that good a name the first time.

So the point of this is to…learn magic, but in a more esoteric, Rocky-training-with-farm-equipment way?

Apparently so, since the weird hermit teacher who greats them makes some wildly bombastic speech about “you know nothing, Quinten Snow” and how he’s going to train them to be able to do magic without thinking about it and if you can’t learn what he’s got then you’ll always be a second-rate magician.

The hermit teacher then takes away their power of speech so we get just giant blocks of text about life in Antarctica Magic School, which to be fair isn’t that different from the bulk of the book so far.

As much as it was like anything, magic was like a language. And like a language, textbooks and teachers treated it as an orderly system for the purposes of teaching it, but in reality it was complex and chaotic and organic. It obeyed rules only to the extent that it felt like it, and there were almost as many special cases and one-time variations as there were rules.

I really like this passage. This is an excellent comparison. (Although I have the contrary urge to point out that this would be apt for most fields of study, so you’re still just doing wobbly science.)

There’s a lot of description of tedious, difficult training that is almost as annoying to read about as it would be to actually do it, and then one day they…

…

…they all turn into arctic foxes as part of an exercise, go outside, pair off, and have magical/instinct-drive sex. Q pairs off with Alice, and it’s clear that her fox-self is terrified, but it’s also clear that Q isn’t in control of himself.

More than that, the vocabulary used to describe his out-of-control-ness is CREEPY AS FUCK and reminiscent of the kind of rape culture shit that already gets said about “instincts” so…

Why does the creepiest shit like this always pop out in the most boring ass books in the world? First ACOTAR and now this one?

The next morning, as there is “awkward” fallout from…all that, the text seems to imply that it WASN’T hermit teacher magically raping all of them and instead it was just…a natural consequence of foxes being horney?? WHAT?????? Is that even a thing?

Yeah, so no, they have a specific season in which they mate, it’s not just free-for-all.

But, going back to the whole no-magic and the creepy-vocab stuff… Ugh, everything about this has such gross implications. It’s going to creep out anyone who doesn’t believe the “instincts” bullshit and reinforce it for anyone who does.

And now Q wonders if he’s in love with Alice which, wow, I feel so bad for Alice.

So…that, and then the text goes on to describe training some more, and…randomly mentions that a lot of the students relieve stress and tension by regularly having sex with each other? Voluntarily? So the fox-instinct-sex REALLY WASN’T NECESSARY? Just have Q and Alice make a bad decision once instead of having fox-Alice terrified of being raped OR JUST STOP MENTIONING SEX BECAUSE YOU ARE BAD AT IT.

Then months later, with no further interaction described between Alice and Q, on the morning of their final exam, she’s just like “so are you in love with me?” and ASDFHLASKDJFHALKSDJGHASDJFKA

I really shouldn’t be surprised. Actually, I’m not surprised. That had all of the grace, skill, and build-up of anything else in this whole book.

Q passes the final exam, which is to get from the school to the actual south pole (500 miles) with only magic and no supplies. He does, and it’s extremely dull, because as ever, nothing actually happens.