Brakebills lets out for winter holiday and Q is nervous about going home.

He was worried that if he left Brakebills they’d never let him back in. He would never find his way back again – they would close the secret door to the garden behind him, lock it, and its outline would be lost forever

I like this line. It’s…a distressingly familiar thought process. Not rational, but then, depression usually isn’t.

We get a bland summary of his parents (polite, interested in him, but OMG THAT’S JUST THE WORST somehow), and a lot of waffling about how the muggle world is just the worst, just omg so boring you guys, like how can they even stand how suffy and dull it is to not have magic.

Which is a weird juxtaposition against last chapter’s endless whining about how magic is actually really hard and boring and ultimately pointless. PICK A SIDE, BOOK.

And also, maybe, like, actually stay in a scene long enough to develop it instead of giving us these endless summaries with no actual dialogue or action in them? We get a similarly dry recounting of him meeting James and Julia again to hang out, in which the narration assures us that he’s different, no, really, he is, totally different. Just, you know, somehow. And you’re not allowed to see it, just trust me, it’s there. Followed by a summary of one of the fictional Fillory novels and

OMG this is so BORING. And dense. It’s just endless paragraph after paragraph of telling us what’s going on in long summaries with nothing to break it up. I think the plot summary of the fake novel is longer than his entire meeting with James and Julia, which makes no sense!

Now that he had been to Brakebills and knew something about real magic he could read Plover with a more critical eye. He wanted to know the technical details behind the spells. And why were the dwarves building that giant clock in the first place?

IT’S.

FICTION.

Like, obviously it’s not going to stay as such, this book being what it is, but one could at least give us a hint of a clue as to why Q is thinking this way. The manuscript hasn’t been mentioned since it went missing and even when it was around it was just a lost novel, nothing to suggest it was telling a true thing. It would be one thing if Q tried to apply his knowledge to the fictional world, in a “if this was real, how would we make it work” kind of way, but that’s not what’s going on. He’s musing on the motivations of DWARVES. Do those exist for real in this magical alternate reality? We don’t know! Does Q think they exist? We also don’t know! The amount of time this book can wax poetical about how special something is without actually imparting any information is truly astounding.

There’s two whole pages hammering into us some foreshadowing about the fictional character Martin, who threw a hissy fit about not being special enough and then disappeared into the woods. And then, for basically no reason at all, Q decides New York is just too plain to contain all of his magical wonder and he hops off to Brakebills again.

Maybe New York would be more appealing if you’d actually…you know, do stuff in it.

The school year stars up again and we get YET MORE SUMMARIES of Alice and Q suddenly being in Second Year and kind of shunned by both classes. We, of course, get to see absolutely no cool magic or learn anything new about it in this time.

One day, out of the blue, Q grabs some kid we’ve never heard of (but who he totally knows, has known this whole time, no really, we didn’t make him up just now, promise) named Surendra. Another girl named Gretchen joins them and oh, joy, we get some ablest language from Q about her limp.

She wasn’t embarrassed about her leg. She told anybody who would listen that that’s where her power came from, and if she had it surgically corrected she wouldn’t be able to do magic anymore. Nobody knew if it was true or not.

1) While I can completely believe someone with a deformity saying that kind of a comment, the whole line just reeks of able-bodied writer. I think it’s the implied shock that she’s not ‘embarrassed’ that really puts it over the line, as if she should be but she’s so cool for playing it off ‘right.’ There’s a real pressure among disable people to make ableds feel comfortable around them, even to the point of sacrificing their own comfort and needs. Otherwise they get branded as the ‘bad’ kind of disabled. Gretchen could be genuinely joking about her disability because she’s comfortable with it, or it could be a maladaptive coping technique, or it could be both (such things do fluctuate) but either way, blandly phrasing it like that completely paints over the nuance of the issue in favor of the “make me comfortable if you want to be a good disabled” mindset.

2) What do you mean you don’t know? …I, just…do you think everyone has a physical source of their power, or do you think Gretchen doesn’t have ‘real’ magic and she got some facsimile a-la Daredevil powers? And how can you not research such a thing? WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU DON’T KNOW YOU’RE IN A SCHOOL FOR FUCKING MAGIC FIND OUT WHY DON’T YOU

Q and his two random new people go to a giant chessboard where the well adjusted students are like “what, you’ve never played magic chess aka welters before?” And then they…don’t play welters. They talk about how great it is and how everyone at school plays it, and then they leave again without explaining any rules or playing or anything.

There’s a nod to Quidditch with Q asking “Where’s the broomsticks?” but fuck you, book, I’d rather be reading about Quidditch. It was a ridiculous game, but at least the characters actually PLAYED it.

On the way back to the main building, they start talking about Eliot, and Q is irrationally pleased to be friends with him even though

1) in reality they hardly spoke to each other anymore.

2) we haven’t seen any indication that Eliot has any special place in the school’s social structure? Mostly because, again, we haven’t seen much of the school’s social structure at all.

Surendra says that Eliot mostly hangs out with other Physical kids, then has to explain that in third year students have to pick a particular Discipline to specialize in (Physical magic being one of those). And the author for sure did not just make that up five minutes ago, nope. The other kids are surprised Q didn’t know all this already, but see there’s a very good reason Q didn’t know it. And that reason….is definitely NOT that the author just made it up. Not sure what it is, but it can’t be that, nope, surely not.

Then Penny walks up out of the blue and punches Q in the face.

The two engage in some flaily grappling until physically pulled apart, and…well, we slip right back into long winded summaries of nothing again. A page or so about how Q got first aide and went to dinner, but nary a clue about why Penny picked a fight. Or, like, any hint of anyone even asking that question? Out loud, at least. Q wonders it in his head, but there’s not, like, teachers trying to figure out what happened or students wondering or anything.

Or maybe that stuff did happen, and we’ll find out three chapters from now when it’ll come up out of the blue, who knows.