The very next afternoon March taught them a simple chant to say over their marbles in a crooked g****-sounding language

Ew, book. Ew.

[…] accompanied by a tricky gesture that involved moving the middle and pinky fingers on both hands independently, which is a lot harder than it sounds. Those who completed it successfully could leave early, the rest had to stay until they got it right. How would they know when they got it right? They would know.

Yeah, so, not really seeing how this isn’t science? How is “say word and move fingers to get X result” fundamentally different from “mix this and that in a beaker to get X result”?

Also, that’s…really fucking boring. Even when Q finally gets it, he admits “he didn’t even know what he did differently this time” and it just works to make the marble move on its own. So, like…that’s magic. Say words and wiggle fingers, and if you’re inherently special enough, it just works.

It’s the same problem the Harry Potter world had, where there’s no interrogation of what makes it work even within the narrow context of personally doing it, it’s just rote memorization of words and movements. Except with HP, 1) it was for kids and 2) the rest of the world was fantastical enough and had colorful enough characters that it made up for the lack of pizazz in the magic casting and 3) THE RESULTS WERE AT LEAST COOLER THAN A LITTLE WOBBLE.

And, like, I don’t really have a problem with ‘say words and if you’re a special person then the special words work for you’ as a magic system. That’s relatively fine, pretty standard for an urban fantasy (or most fantasies). But in this book in particular where I’ve been told that magic requires AWESOME COSMIC LEVELS OF INTELLIGENCE, to see…this? Fucking disappointing.

Also, it’s a school. I can deal with finger waving and nothing else in, like, an action-adventure fantasy. But you’re in a fucking classroom. If that’s not an excuse to get esoteric, then why bother?

We then skip several months of classes.

Quentin learned to cool his marble until it frosted over. He caused it to roll around a table by invisible means. He learned to float his marble in midair. He made it glow from within.

Yawn. Hey, let’s go hang out with the carpenters and see what they’re doing.

I don’t know what it is, but it at least looks interesting!

He also does history classes, about which we learn ALMOST NOTHING except a whole paragraph of vague “it’s really cool, I promise”-ing. They do the standard “this really cool people you know from history were really magic” line that I HATE SO MUCH, and then compound it with a “but they were small potatoes compared to the magicians you never heard about” which MAKES ME HATE IT EVEN MORE.

Stop trying tell me you’re cool, book. You’re not even living up to the standard of carpentry videos I found on YouTube. Do something.

By the standards of magical society they’d fallen at the first hurdle: they hadn’t had the basic good sense to keep their shit to themselves.

BUT

WHY

The book just leaves it there. We learn nothing. We have no idea why this is ‘good sense’ if magic has ‘always’ existed as this book claims. We know nothing about society, about history, about why it would be in hiding, about any consequences, about any enforcement, WE KNOW NOTHING.

JFC, THE KIDS BOOK YOU ARE TRYING SO HARD TO SURPASS DID THIS SO MUCH BETTER THAN YOU, GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER, THE MAGICIANS. I mean, there’s some just really basic things this book is missing. It honestly reads more like HP fanfic than its own thing, because it wants to piggy back off reader assumptions for things like secrecy and society. The fact that we’re restricted to just one location is a big part of the problem, compounded by the fact the book doesn’t realize there’s a problem and so can’t even bother to give us the dreadful infodumps it so clearly needs.

This could have easily been solved by sending Q home until the proper start of term. Leaving him at an empty school did nothing for our understanding of the world, and it would have been so illuminating for him to be home and see, for instance, who the fuck is going around and brain-mucking all the parents. Is there some sort of organization that does that? Do the teachers do it, like an extra duty? Maybe he could have found some of this ‘magical society’ somewhere in NYC and done some exploring, or gone to a new student orientation, or…honestly just about anything than ‘I wandered empty hallways for several weeks.’

And that whole “why are you hiding” thing is my biggest pet peeve in Urban Fantasy. I mean, I don’t mind a good masquerade, I just want to see some good reasons for it. Too many books don’t even bother, they just assume you’ll agree that they need to hide because….genre conventions, I guess. But there’s a ton of different reasons magic could be hiding, just put a modicum of effort into making the reason interesting, please. Or don’t hide at all, that’s an option, it can still be Urban Fantasy in that case. I read a book once where magic comes and goes, literally, and society had adapted to switch back and forth between ‘electricity’ and ‘magic’ without warning and it was. THERE’S OPTIONS.

Q then goes on to complain that in his precious Fillory books all the kids got to learn cool skills in montages that were “nonstop orgy of wonderment” and how sad it is that real life isn’t like that but…um…the skills he lists are fencing and archery and riding. Those are really boring to learn at first, with lots of repetitive basics to master. So…Q really thinks that reality should be a children’s fiction book?

I’m starting to understand the earlier bits about him being unhealthily obsessed with the books, and I don’t think it’s the uber-fan or the depression talking here.

The same way a verb has to agree with its subject, it turned out, even the simplest spell had to be modified and tweaked and inflected to agree with the time of day, the phase of the moon, the intention and purpose and precise circumstances of its casting, and a hundred other factors

But it’s totally not science, y’all.

Also, that sounds actually cool and yet the only thing we’ll hear about it is this line.

Ah, we finally get a little something about how magic actually works during the casting, and it comes down to…you have to just really want it. Meh, it’s not the worst passage, pretty well described I guess. Failing to see how you get a ‘turtles all the way down’ situation out of that, though.

The book then turns to describing random things about the school and other students, randomly. It’s utterly without structure, because for some reason it’s decided to go through the whole first semester all at once without even giving us a full day in chronological order before jumping into this. I will never understand this book’s priorities.

The food, contrary to private school tradition, was excellent in an old-fashioned, Frenchified way. Menus tended toward mid-century warhorses like boeuf en daube and lobster thermidor.

1) Contrary to what now? Have you stopped even trying to put down the rest of the world to make yourself look better and now just assume everyone will agree with you that Brakebills is better without elaboration needed?

2) WHO IS PAYING FOR THIS?

Oh, cool, and a s***ge slur, awesome, totally needed that.

And, uh, yeah. That’s it for a whole chapter. How utterly dull.

This book has serious, serious structural flaws because it just will not get out of its own way. Its more concerned with convincing you that its cool than it is with telling you a story, which leads to shit like this overarching montage being put in place before any of us have a reason to give a shit about it. Most of this could be displayed alongside actual scenes which might, IDK, provide some character or set up a plot. Instead, we have very little in the way of characters and absolutely zilch in the way of plot. Unless you are just fascinated by marble tricks, there’s nothing to keep someone hooked.