Y’ALL THEY HAVE FINALLY MADE IT TO NARNIA!

WE ARE 72% OF THE WAY THROUGH THIS BOOK AND THE ACTUAL PLOT CAN FINALLY START.

Maybe, assuming this is the plot, which considering this book who knows.

For reasons too ridiculous to dwell on, they leave their winter coats behind and then wind up in Narnia/Fillory in winter.

So far Fillory is just a forest and a lot of snow (plus a clock in a tree, which is part of the storybook-in-a-story). Basically, just basic ass children’s fantasy land. Q is so overwhelmed by ‘trees’ and ‘snow’ and ‘literally nothing happening yet’ that he breaks down in tears.

This was his life now, the life he had always been waiting for. It was finally here.

I’m torn, because as a depressed person I TOTALLY get the whole “if I can just do this one thing it’ll fix everything” feeling. (Should have seen me at my first BEA event, I was a total mess because of this.) But as a reader? I’m bored. It took too long to get here, Q’s obsession with this place has been too erratic in its depictions so far, and … frankly there just hasn’t been enough character building to pull this off so far. I’ve been told about Q and Fillory without being invested in that relationship for so long that all of this is just the Brakebills intro all over again. “Why is this special? Why is this magical? I get thinking that some big gesture will fix your life because brains suck that way, but why this big gesture???”

Q just decides, sans any explanation, that they have to find one of the story characters: Martin.

Why bother planning an adventure? This was Fillory-adventure would find them!

I feel like this is also the book’s approach to plot.

Also apparently we have completely given up on the earlier theory that the world is real but the children’s stories/characters/narratives were made up. Suddenly it’s an absolute given that Martin is a real person and so are all of the other characters. Which I’m sure will turn out to be correct, because why bother with something actually interesting.

They find….a creek.

On Earth, it would have been a charming little rill, nothing more, but the fact that they were seeing it in Fillory, in another world, possibly the first Earth beings ever to do so, made it a glittering miracle.

Are you fucking kidding me?

Well, finally something does happen: they meet a naiad and she speaks in vague terms. She says there aren’t any other humans with curses like this group, and there’s a war, and here’s a horn to use if you’re in dire need, and also bye now!

I guess that was properly Narnia-ish, at least.

Got to adult it up by making sex jokes, because that’s how you adult, clearly. Just make it sad and sex and maybe even some sadsex. That’s this book in a nutshell.

They head back to the in-between place to collect their cold weather gear that they left behind for NO GOOD REASON, and just before they go they hear ticking clocks indicating the Big Bad of the books, the Watcherwoman. When they come back to Fillory, it’s in a different time and now the weather is early fall.

So much hullabaloo is made over these stupid winter coats. What to do, what to do with them? JUST FUCKING PACK THEM LIKE YOU SHOULD HAVE DONE FROM THE START, it’s fucking Narnia, anything could happen. This is why you gathered a bunch of gear in the first place!

The group continues to wander around along whatever kind of looks like a path, and then they find a road and come upon a carriage. Inside is a giant praying mantis bug that asks if they have the horns and if they serve the bull. When the group is nothing but confused, the mantis tries to bow-and-arrow shoot Q and then rides off again. Thankfully (or not), Penny uses magic to stop the arrow.

And…they just keep going. I mean, why not, can’t expect the book to shift writing style’s at this point in the game. Vignettes and summaries, that’s all we’ve got.

Everything was much less entertaining and more difficult to organize than they’d counted on.

If you wanted this shit to work now, you probably shouldn’t have been repeating it literally the entire book so far. All of these characters are just…what, willfully refusing to learn from their lived experiences?

We just have to keep moving. Keep picking up clues. If we leave now and come back it’ll be like five hundred years from now and we’ll have to start all over again.

Start what all over again? You have no goals!

And then they randomly follow a walking tree into a bar.

This fucking book, y’all.