Fifth year starts, and it’s just Alice and Q in their club house. Q finally notices that he has no solid connections to any of the other students. Alice says the others think they’re snobs.

He sighed. “They probably do. Uncharitable bastards. They’re the snobs.”

Q, I swear to g- How are you this clueless?

Q and Alice, in their final year of school, at last decide to maybe go make friends. The land on Gretchen, and “it helped that Alice and Gretchen were both prefects.”

??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

Since when? And why? Prefects of what? American schools don’t have prefects!

The position carried with it almost no official duties; mostly it was just yet another absurd, infantilizing idea borrowed from the English public school system, a symptom of the Anglophilia that was embedded so deeply in the institutional DNA of Brakebills.

1) “just yet another” is giving me hives.

2) Prefects have duties, it’s not that hard to look these things up.

3) This whole thing feels like someone pointed out to author that, in cribbing from Harry Potter, he also brought over some awkward school mismatch stuff. Then instead of fixing it he just went “oh, yeah, uh, Anglophilia.” Which hasn’t been mentioned before, but then again, nothing is mentioned before it springs up out of the aether so why stop now.

4) How is it “infantilizing” exactly? The prefect system endows certain students with extra authority, isn’t that the opposite of infantilizing?

Oh and too-many-water-glasses Penny is also a prefect. Turns out Penny was sorted into a Discipline because his testing threw up an answer so arcane that didn’t fit into any of the categories but…THAT’S WHAT HAPPENED TO Q AS WELL. So why didn’t he end up in Physical? The whole reason Q went there was because he had no Discipline officially and Physical had the least number of students in it. Why couldn’t Penny come along, too? But no, Penny is an anti-social glum loner instead now.

This fucking book.

There’s a new crop of Physical Kids sorted into their Discipline, and Alice and Q complain about that.

“I feel like an elderly docent,” Quentin said.

“I already forgot their names,” Alice said. “They’re like quadruplets.”

Both of you are a mere single year older than these new students.

Also, fucking snobs.

At Christmas, Q eschews his own “terrible” family and goes home with Alice instead. Her father is a magical architect and changes their house every few years into different and wildly disparate styles. Currently it’s all ancient Rome, or at the very least, the version of ancient Rome that one would get without doing any study into the matter. Which seems fair, considering the kind of “rigorous academia” Brakebills fosters.

Alice’s mother does…something with music.

It is thoroughly unclear how any of them make money.

Later, Alice bemoans how terrible her parents are and Q wonders if they’re insane and calls them “toxic monsters.” So far they haven’t been anything except exuberant and eccentric. Between this, Eliot’s perfectly normal family, and Q’s parents…I’m really wondering what this book’s damage is regarding parents. It’s starting to feel like there’s some sort of grudge going on.

More to the point, there’s no room for a study in “seemingly okay but crushing in subtle ways” family situations. This book is already too full; nothing has any room for exploration because we have to rush past every single point in order to shove five years into a couple hundred pages. We barely even get characters talking to each other. Alice’s mother doesn’t have a single on-page line of dialogue; she’s merely summarized and brushed off so we can speculate on her mental state instead.

Also, neither person shows signs of mental illness, it’s yet another “call them crazy for doing things I don’t particularly like” example.

Speaking of mental illness, Q’s depression has…well in the first place it was never really called out as such, but it was at least displayed. By this point in the story, however, it’s faded into the fucking wall of exposition that’s going on. If he is still depressed, Q doesn’t struggle with it, at least not that we see.

We hardly see anything of Q at all. Sure, he’s on every page, but there’s so many words given over to describing whole years at a glance or catching us up on Penny or stuff like that, and as a consequence Q…is just sort of there. Holding the camera but not really doing anything with it. I feel like I barely know anything about him, other than a handful of deeply negative traits.

Despite widespread popular resistance, or possibly because of it, Dean Fogg entered Brakebills in an international welters tournament, and Quentin traveled to overseas magic schools for the first time, though he didn’t see much of them beyond the welters court, and once in a while a dining hall. They played in the emerald-green courtyard of a medieval keep in the misty Carpathians, and at a compound bushwhacked out of the seemingly endless Argentine pampas. On Rishiri Island, off the northern coast of Hokkaido, they played on the most beautiful welters court Quentin had ever seen. The sand squares were a searing white and perfectly scraped and leveled. The grass squares were lime green and clipped to a regulation 12 mm. The water squares steamed darkly in the chilly air. Frowning, uncannily humanoid monkeys watched them play, clinging to wiggly pine trees, their bare pink faces ringed with nimbi of snowy-white fur.

And that’s it. That’s all we get on the whole rest of the world. In the very next paragraph, they go home because they lost all their games.

That is this book in a nutshell.

1) Take something from Harry Potter

2) Oh god, I’m so bored now

3) What were we talking about? Oh, idk, just throw in some monkeys or something

Q gets closer to graduating and the narration waxes philosophic for a while. But, like, the kind of philosophic Guy in your MFA would wax immediately after taking a 101 class.

everything about the world after Brakebills felt dangerously vague and under-thought to Quentin.

Gee, I wonder why.

What was he going to do? What exactly ? Every ambition he’d ever had in his life had been realized the day he was admitted to Brakebills

No it wasn’t, because Q never had any ambition. Which is fine for an 18 year-old, but really, if this is a known problem in this world, why does the college not prepare you for it?

Or maybe the school does, because the text vaguely mentions all the other students excitedly networking with grown-up magicians (somehow?) while Q just cries about how there’s no storybook monsters to slay.

JFC, the more they go on about what the other students will/could do, the more utterly shite this world sounds. “Infiltrate governments to magically influence world matters” or “conduct massive nature-based art projects” or “have globe-spanning mock-battles with other wizards for fun” and

And this is the worldview of some sheltered, rich, do nothing, trust fund baby who’s never had to worry about a single thing in his whole life except what would be personally entertaining to him. This is privileged shit written from inside an ivory tower that has never had to face a single real problem.

This author couldn’t world-build if his life depended on it because he’s never had to deal with the world. The greatest problem is how to be fulfilled and LITERALLY NOTHING ELSE. There’s no sense of community or ethics or collective purpose. Everything is highly individualized and magically subsidized. No wonder there’s barely any character interactions in this book when the author can’t even conceive of what a community is. That basic, fundamental lack of humanity bleeds into everything about this mess and for no conceivable reason I am more furious about it now than I have been so far, even though it’s been there from the start.

Fuck, it’s 1 in the afternoon and I want to start drinking but then I’d be like the dumb-ass kids in this book so I think I’ll go make some tea instead.