Q and Alice have to do senior thesis. Alice tries to capture a single photon using magic, and has to invent a bunch of complicated shit in the attempt.

Q wants to fly to the moon. Which has already been done and is way more boring than upending quantum physics. And then he doesn’t even manage it and just slinks back home. WHY ARE YOU SO BORING, Q?

And then….there is no consequence. We just slide right into the graduation party, which involves everyone getting drunk, because this book can’t seem to figure out how to do anything without alcohol being involved. Dean Fogg gives them all a lecture about the power of magic, which I guess subs in for a commencement speech?

“It’s unlikely you’ll ever seen anything as bad as what happened on the day of the Beast.

Oh, honey, that was so many chapters ago, I forgot it even happened. Also, it wasn’t that scary and no one’s brought it up since then, so….?

But I’ll tell you something: I think you’re magicians because you’re unhappy. A magician is strong because he feels pain.

Oh, this tired old shit again. I started this book kind of interested in Q’s clear clinical depression but by this point in the book I’m just sick of all the bullshit trying to tie that to magical ability. It’s absurd. It completely misses what depression/unhappiness IS and substitutes in all these tired old platitudes about ‘character building’ or whatnot. Depression has never made me stronger. It made me weaker in literally every sense of the word, including physically. This whole school needs some therapy and good, strong slap upside the head.

And more to the point….it’s just so dull? This is shit that’s been lobbed around for ages and the book isn’t exactly exploring the theme all that much because it just assumes it can say “pain = power” and have that count as deep. Q wallows around sadly for a lot and then does nothing and OMG SO DEEP. It didn’t even come up in the learning portions, instead that was all concentration and indefinable tingly feelings. If you’re going to bring up this trite, at least explore it! If sadness really is a ‘fuel’ as Fogg calls it, why don’t they feel happier after doing spells, because all their sad got used up? Does magic generate sadness? Which it then uses? Is the school designed to make depression worse so the kids will all have enough sads to do the work? WHY IS EVERYTHING SO SHALLOW?

I’ll tell you why, it’s because this author thought he was the bees knees and the first to think of very banal concepts so he didn’t put in the work. “It’s novel to me, so that makes it novel in general! I’m a genius!” Ugh.

“But just in case that’s not enough, each one of you will leave this room tonight with an insurance policy: a pentagram tattooed on your back. Five-point star, nicely decorative, plus it acts as a holding cell for a demon, a small but rather vicious little fellow.

Um. That was a hard turn.

Supposedly the demon is there so they can use it in a fight, but only once. And I just…am confused? Do they expect their magicians to do a lot of fighting? Because kind of a big theme this chapter has been “there are no magical adventures to go on, enjoy politics” which just doesn’t seem like you need a fighting demon for.

But of course Q will go on a Fillory adventure, and we know this, so a demon fighter reeks of too much “characters reading the script.”

After graduating, Alice and Q move to NYC and we skip to two months later. They’re squatting in an apartment and using magic to avoid being evicted so, yeah, they need no money they just magic for everything. Just…”oh, right, I guess people without a trust fund have to pay for things. Ugh, that’s too hard to think about, just say magic did it.”

(Also, Q is from Park Slope and his parents have a McMansion, are we sure he doesn’t have a trust fund?)

The narration laments how boring the real world is, which isn’t saying much since it just spent 57% of the book assuring me that Brakebills was boring (and yet also fascinating) as well. But there is some magical culture…in the immigrant communities.

JFC, book, have you met any subject you can’t make worse? The exoticizing of these descriptions is physically painful.

Also, why are these people not invited to Brakebills as well?

For the first year after graduation his financial needs were taken care of by an immense secret slush fund, amassed covertly over the centuries through magically augmented investing, that yielded a regular allowance for all newly minted magicians who needed it.

So. Yup. Trust fund babies.

Q spends it all on drinking and partying.

Eat the fucking rich.