Q’s test is really strange, and we spend a few pages getting descriptions of the bizarre, nonsensical, and clearly magical questions while Q tries to explain away the odd behavior of his test booklet as being some newfangled technology. But Q is gifted, and he’s an excellent test taker, and this test will not break him, damnit, so he doubles down and does his best. Basically the attitude I’d expect from ultra-high-gifted kid accustomed to constant high pressure exams.

There’s also a lot of math, which Q is unusually gifted at, so he finds that part easy.

Quentin, who was so mysteriously good at math that his high school had been forced out outsource that part of his education to Brooklyn College .

…was he in gifted and talented courses or not, book? Because the first chapter said that not only was he sorted into gifted classes, but he was further sorted into ULTRA-gifted classes, and yet there was nothing that could handle his math abilities?

I looked up Brooklyn College, and unless I’m looking up the wrong one, they’re not exactly highly ranked? They’d be better than a random high school, sure, but…was Q just in public school AP classes and the book thinks that’s ultra special?

Q finishes his test and looks around, noticing that lot of seats are empty, and immediately becomes worried that the other students were just so awesome that they finished early. He also fixates on a shirtless kid with a lot of back tattoos because he’s clearly going to be a major character later.

At the end, 22 students are left who are going to move on to the next stage of testing, which will be one on one. The kids can visit and eat lunch while they wait.

Q winds up talking to the tattoo kid (Penny) who constantly ordered water while testing and how has a desk full of glasses.

“They should have capped it,” explained [Penny]… “How much water you can ask for. Like maybe five glasses at most. I love finding shit like that, where the system screws itself with its own rules.”

So…you just like being an ass, then? Because it’s not like the system was making you order a massive amount of glasses, and also no one really seems to be screwed here, just mildly annoyed.

But so much for that conversation, because it’s over and replaced with vague summary of ‘all the kids talked about stuff,’ before Q gets called in for his individual testing. He enters a room with a lot of magic trick props out, and the teachers ask him to perform.

As a matter of fact, Quentin did like magic tricks. His interest in magic had started three years ago, partly inspired by his reading habits but mostly as a way of fattening up his extracurriculars with an activity that wouldn’t force him to actually interact with other people.

I lol-ed again.

Quentin had spent hundreds of emotionally arid hours with his iPod on palming coins and shuffling cards and producing fake flowers from skinny plastic canes in a trance of boredom.

…but…but you just said Q liked magic? But now he doesn’t?

And maybe he’s bored because the author didn’t bother to look up any actually interesting tricks for him to learn.

He watched and rewatched grainy, porn-like instructional videotapes in which middle-aged men demonstrated close-up magic passes in front of backdrops made of bedsheets. Magic, Quentin discovered, wasn’t romantic at all. It was grim and repetitive and deceptive. And he worked his ass off and became very good at it.

…so he doesn’t like magic?

And also…what? Why so fucking grim about stage magic? Yeah, it’s going to be repetitive just like any learned physical skill, but…so? That doesn’t have to mean it’s grim? You can still enjoy being good at something?

I don’t understand the harshness here. If he just wanted a solo activity for his CV, he could have picked any number of things, so why go for something he so clearly hates, right after saying that he liked it? Plus I can think so many other ways to learn, so the porn-quality videotapes line is just weird. I know this came out in 2009, but better quality shit existed a mere decade ago, too. The internet is that old, DVDs are that old, actual magicians doing classes are that old, books are that old.

This feels like the kitten poster thing, where the book wants something it made up to be cooler, but the only way to manage is to make Q’s past just bizarrely bland as a foil.

Alternately it could be a depression thing, where one feels no joy from tasks they ostensibly like but force themselves through it anyway, but the wording just…seems off, if that’s supposed to be it. Especially compared to the descriptions of joylessness in the first chapter.

Let characters enjoy their hobbies, damnit!

Oh, hey, Q’s proctors is a lady, we’re upping the count!

He does some card tricks, then some coin tricks, but the proctor stops him in the middle of a coin slight-of-hand because he did it wrong. She demonstrates correctly.

He obediently trotted around to her side of the table and stood behind her, trying not to look down her blouse.

I still hate you.

Q imitates her version of the trick but the coin actually disappears, at which point the proctor seems happy and says she’ll send along the next examiner.

He gets three more dudes and one more lady (who is described as young and pretty) so…more ladies but not really any better ratio. Still all on the author on that point. The other examiners ask him to do a variety of bizarre tasks, much like the written test with its odd questions.

He’s left to his own devices for a while and mopes about his life, wondering if his parents will even notice that he’s been gone all afternoon. Eventually he hears another boy crying somewhere.

A teacher was speaking to him quietly and firmly, but the boy either wouldn’t or couldn’t stop. He ignored it, but it was a dangerous, unmanning sound […]

Unmanning.

Unmanning.

That’s the word chosen to convey that something actually wrong is going on.

He overhears some teachers arguing, apparently about how they don’t have enough students to fill out a whole year and if that’s the case they’ll send everyone home and just skip a class year. Vague and ominous and then Q is left to his own devices to sit and wonder about how there’s no electricity. Again. How…so very done already.

Eventually the dean and all the other teachers come in at once, and the dean demands that Q perform magic again. Real magic this time. Q protests that he doesn’t know what that means, Dean gets made and forcefully insists, until Q snaps. He randomly starts chanting in a racistly-described language and throws all the cards up in the air and they land in a house-of-cards configuration.

I’m…just so bored, really. How many times have we seen ‘character randomly bursts out magic when angry’? How many times have we seen ‘character just suddenly knows this or the other spell’? I don’t even see the point, since he’s been getting odd tests all day and made them work. Why does he have to do something flashy to get into the school that teaches magic? Why can’t the small stuff suffice as an entry exam?

Also Q turns the stack of nickels he’d been doing tricks with into a…flaming sword. Just…because, I guess. Subtlety go bye-bye. He angrily demands to know what’s going on, but instead the group of teachers just applaud him and say he passed.