Jean Dujardin and Berenice Bejo, aka your new favourite film stars

Before everyone saw/sees The Artist they had/will have this exact conversation: “Every film critic in the world loves it, and it’s nominated for a million Oscars, but I’m not sure I’ll like it because it’s in black and white and it’s silent and it’ll probably be horrible.”

Critically beloved, Oscar-nominates bores are standard fare, especially at this time of year, so: fair enough. But The Artist is not boring or horrible! It’s really, really, great: unique and joyful and captivating and – best of all – unpretentious. Director Michel Hazanavicius didn’t make a black-and-white silent film then shove a stick up its ass just to show stuffy film critics how much he knows about cinema. He made a black-and-white silent movie because he’s passionate about cinema. The Artist glows with that passion.

There isn’t much to the plot – silent movie star is pushed aside by talkies movie star¹ but they fall in love anyway. That’s pretty much it. With an adorable dog. Spoiler alert! – but The Artist is nevertheless super-engaging. Because the story unfolds via expressions and body language and the occasional title card, you’re forced to pay attention. And this is a pretty rare thing in an age where everyone’s attention span is about three seconds long. Succumb to the siren song of your smartphone, and you’ll miss an important plot point… or at least the adorable dog doing something adorable.

There’s also the novelty factor of watching a black-and-white film – everyone onscreen radiates that spectacular monochrome glow – with almost no dialogue – “This is how people used to watch movies? Neat!”. But the old-timey gimmick doesn’t dominate The Artist to the point where that’s all there is to it. This is mostly down to leads Jean Dujardin² (his smile!) and Bérénice Bejo (her smile!), who are marvellous terrific wonderful amazing. Their chemistry! Please cast them opposite each other in another movie, Hollywood. I want to watch them together again and again and again and again.

Sadly, like many films before it, The Artist does not feature enough Missi Pyle. But it does feature just the right amounts of James Cromwell and John Goodman. I didn’t expect any of them to be in this film!

Don’t force yourself to see The Artist just because it’s got lots of Academy Awards nominations and you want to sound smart pretending you liked it. Go see it because it’s a fun, straight-up entertaining film.

1. “Talkies”. Isn’t that a great word. “Talkies”. What a shame it fell out of fashion. Let’s all start using it again! “Hey, want to go to the talkies tonight?” “Nah, I hate 3D talkies.”
2. Which is sexy-French for John Gardener. God, English is so dull.

Clockwork Prince

It’d be so easy to write Clare’s books off as florid trash – and they are certainly floridly trashy – except there’s something about them that just works. Even when the dialogue sounds more like something from a contemporary teen drama than 19th-century Victorian London, you keep reading. Even when the stakes of the plot seem to have nicked out for a cigarette break (a long one), you keep reading. Even when Clare tosses in yet another ”They almost kissed but something interrupted them”-style, super-melodramatic cliffhanger… yeah.

(Minor spoilers ahead for Clockwork Prince‘s prequel, Clockwork Angel.)

The “clockwork prince” of the title is Mortmain, a shady fellow with ties to London’s Downworlders – Clare’s collective term for vampires, werewolves, warlocks, and other supernatural riff-raff. He had a hand in the mysterious birth of Tessa Grey, who’s grown up to learn she can take on anyone’s physical appearance, though she’s still yet to discover the true origins and nature of her power.

In Angel, Tessa fell in with London’s Shadowhunters, particularly the handsome but emotionally unavailable Will – a character delivered straight from the Cassandra Clare Factory for Devastatingly Handsome But Emotionally Unavailable Male Leads – and his kind-hearted best friend Jem. In Prince, the trio is tasked with uncovering Mortmain’s dastardly master plan, which apparently involves building menacing robots to kill all the Shadowhunters.

The Shadowhunters spend most of their time gossiping about Mortmain, yet strangely, he never appears in the book named after him. It means there’s never any real threat to Clockwork Prince - no jeopardy. Sure, there’s a subplot about mean Shadowhunters wanting to kick Tessa’s allies out of their headquarters. But there’s never any sense that anything bad will actually happen, and the book kind of shuffles to a close without ever really challenging its characters. In the last few pages I expected something shocking to jump out and ruin everything. It doesn’t.

The problem, I guess, is that Prince suffers from classic “middle instalment in a trilogy” syndrome. It’s a bridge between the origin story and the grand finale, without much to prop it up on its own.

But I doubt that will matter much to Clare’s ardent aficionados, who read these books for one thing: sex. And there’s plenty of that. Sexual tension runs high between Tessa, Jem, Will, and all the supporting characters – conveniently, Shadowhunters’ mores are way more relaxed than those of their Victorian peers. There’s love potions and secret weddings and nighttime trysts and more and more and more and more till the book practically throbs in your hands.

It is ridiculous. And yet, I will keep reading.

Previously: Clockwork Angel, Cassandra Clare

Young Adult is not the zany black comedy suggested by its trailer (which, by the way, basically spoils the entire movie, so you should probably avoid it. Here’s the link!). This is a dark, twisted-and-not-in-that-cute-Hollywood-way portrait of a disturbed woman, but it’s a portrait that doesn’t say enough about its subject.

(Light spoilers ahead.)

The trailer does get the basic plot right: beyond-beautiful Charlize Theron is Mavis Gary, the author of a failing series of young-adult novels who returns to her hometown to reclaim her high-school sweetheart Buddy (Patrick Wilson), who’s now married with a kid.

Soon after arriving in Mercury, a sort of Everywhere/Nowheresville that could stand in for pretty much any small town in America (or Australia, for that matter – the strip mall/fast-food landscape looks the same), Mavis encounters Matt (Patton Oswalt), a former classmate who was brutally beaten and crippled when he was at school. The two bond – who doesn’t love connecting with friends of the jocks who terrorised you as a teenager? – even as Matt tries to talk Mavis out of her ridiculous plans with Buddy.

The problem with Young Adult is that when I ask myself “What is this film about?”, I can’t really come up with an answer. “Continuing to behave like a high-schooler well into your adulthood has bleak consequences.” And… that’s it? The plot doesn’t move beyond that premise; it’s not thoughtful enough to be a character study, too sour to be a comedy.

Mavis sneers at pretty much everyone who enters her field of vision, but I didn’t dislike her because she’s so unlikeable. Unlikeable characters are fine in principle, and it’s not like I hated her: she’s best when her powerful sarcasm is turned up to 11, scoffing when a date boasts about travelling in South-East Asia and rolling her eyes at a stranger’s baby (strangers’ babies are the worst). Nor would Young Adult have been better if Mavis had experienced some vague redemption – that would’ve been way worse, actually – but unlikeable characters still need to offer some reason for us to follow them, and Mavis doesn’t.

She doesn’t feel complicated as much as she feels disparate; she’s mentally ill and an alcoholic and there’s a late reveal about an adolescent miscarriage that probably fuelled her present-day miscarriage, but none of it gels, and some her characterisations are just obvious (the bit where she looks over a chart used to teach autistic kids about emotions, then she remarks that she doesn’t feel any. CLUNK). There’s too little sense of Mavis and what her regular life is like, or how a bitchy high-school prom queen even became a writer in the first place.

(There’s a vague implication Mavis writes young-adult novels because she’s stuck in permanent adolescence herself, which I emphatically reject, and it suggests screenwriter Diablo Cody is pretty ignorant about YA as a whole. It’s not just Sweet Valley High these days.)

It’s not just Mavis who’s so oddly drawn: what is Young Adult trying to say about small-town America? Should we share Mavis’s contempt for Mercury and her classmates who stayed behind? Or come away believing that even escaping your past doesn’t guarantee you’ll escape mediocrity? I have no idea.

Director Jason Reitman offered a better portrait of a stunted adult in Up in the Air. Watch that instead.

Sure, Dreadnought has elements of steampunk (walking robots appear right at the beginning) and zombies (which appear right at the end), but this is, ultimately, the story of a woman on a train.

Said woman is Mercy Lynch, a no-nonsense nurse working in a Confederate hospital during the Civil War. She learns her father is dying, which raises two problems: first, she hasn’t seen him since he ran out on her and her mother years ago; second, he lives all the way on the other side of the country.

But Mercy is weary of the gore she bandages up every day, and grieving the recent death of her husband, and so embarks on the long journey – travelling via dirigible (hey, another steampunk element!), then riverboat, then train. And what a train! The Dreadnought is a formidable Union war engine, loaded with weapons, carrying a mysterious cargo in the front and an even more mysterious cargo in the back.

Dreadnought is set in the same universe as Boneshaker, and features a handful of the same characters, but it’s a remarkably different novel to its predecessor… which is not a flaw! Once you adjust to Priest’s languid pace - it takes Mercy forever to finally board the eponymous Dreadnought – it’s a pleasure to read.

The American Civil War isn’t my favourite historical period, but Priest mostly makes it interesting – “mostly” because there’s still the odd infodump that I skipped over. The dry, oh-so-American tone is pitch-perfect, though the book’s greatest achievement is Mercy herself: she’s strong and capable and smart, and the best, most memorable thing about Dreadnought.

There is one thing the book is lacking: a map of the US, or at least all the states Mercy passes through on her journey. Most of the time I couldn’t picture her location in my head. My apologies, America, for not knowing exactly how all your states fit together.

Previously: Book review: Boneshaker, Cherie Priest

Like, god, I get it, sheez, I need to read Bossypants already. So I did. (It’s such an easy book I finished it in a day. So there’s really no excuse for not having read it. Why haven’t you read Bossypants yet?!)

And it’s great! Is it really necessary to point out that this is a smart and funny book? We all know Tina Fey is a smart and funny woman. We’re all fans of 30 Rock and Mean Girls and Mom Jeans here. (Right? If you answered “No”, GTFO.)

She’s an attractive woman, too, but it feels weird pointing that out for a couple reasons. First: would you point it out in a review of a male comedian-writer-actor’s book? Why must a woman’s achievements still be framed around her appearance? Bossypants is a pretty explicitly feminist¹ book, and Fey raises a lot of questions like these, mostly arguing that institutionalised sexism exists less because everyone is a misogynist and more because it goes unchallenged too often.

The other reason it’s weird to point out Fey’s attractiveness is that she doesn’t seem comfortable with that label. The book is so rife with references to her physical flaws – 30 Rock‘s Liz Lemon is the personification of all those neuroses – that it’d feel like she was exploiting the “I’m so not attractive!” thing, if it didn’t read so genuinely. It’s startling to come to the chapter in Bossypants that documents Fey’s discomfort at photoshoots (fame isn’t as eternally glamorous as everyone makes out?!), and even more startling when she name-drops her own pubic hair (famous women have that?!).

But even as she’s writing about herself there’s an impression that Fey is very guarded, unwilling to open herself up completely for us. There is a genuine sense of her personality revealed in Bossypants, but there’s also a sense of the “real-life” Tina Fey lurking off the page, unseen and unrevealed.

Which is fine! Since when is Fey obliged to offer a reality TV-style, warts-and-more-warts expose of every aspect of her personality? Instead, Bossypants is more akin to a really great stand-up show, in book form. There are a lot of LLOLs (that’s literal laugh-out-louds) in there.

And, unexpectedly, the best and funniest bits are Fey’s recollections of her off-camera life: her awkward formative years, her early dabblings in improv comedy (I admire her unironic, earnest, heartfelt passion for the form), her experiences with marriage and motherhood. I say “unexpected” because much is made of the book’s anecdotes about Alec Baldwin and Oprah and Sarah Palin and who have you, and they’re interesting, but they’re not what makes the book.

So what I’m saying is: why haven’t you read Bossypants yet?!

1. Important note!: “Feminist” is not meant to imply “Overbearingly feminist”!

Surely there is no one in the world who hates the Muppets. Is there anyone in the world who hates the Muppets? No one in the world hates the Muppets.

But plenty of people don’t care about the Muppets – not really care. People who know their names, and remember the gang with fondness, but don’t think about them much. People like me! The Muppets never went away, because the internet keeps everything going (all those Muppet video parodies went viral for a reason) (at least till everyone got sick of them), but they lost what I guess you’d call relevance.

This isn’t surprising: the Muppets are relics of childhood. You watched their TV show(s) and their movies (even the ones where they all played characters from classic literature for some reason) as a kid. Till recently their last (theatrically released) movie was 1999′s a-bit-of-a-hash Muppets from Space. So it’s a bit like reuniting with an old friend to see them again in The Muppets – note the definite article in the title, declaring this is the big-screen outing that will make them pop-culture fixtures again.

Leading man Jason Segal, who also co-wrote the screenplay, throws himself at the film with charming, catching energy. He plays Gary, a small-town American whose brother Walter (performed by Peter Linz), is a muppet; lower-case “m”, because although Gary is unmistakably Henson-esque he’s not one of the Muppets, though he’s been obsessed with their TV show since childhood.

Gary and Walter travel to Los Angeles to visit the famed Muppet Theatre with Mary (Amy Adams, adorable as always), who’s been dating Gary for 10 years. She’s hoping for a marriage proposal but her relationship with Gary is stuck firmly in platonic territory, thanks to his attachment to, and dependency on, his muppet brother.

Arriving in LA, the trio discovers the Theatre has become a derelict wreck, slated for demolition by oil baron Tex Richman (Chris Cooper, whose character is evil because this whole film is anti-capitalist propaganda for children). Gary tracks down Kermit, a recluse since his separation from Miss Piggy, and convinces him to reunite the Muppets and put on one last show to save the Theatre.

The story then works out exactly the way you think it does, with a lot of celebrity cameos thrown in.

But that predictability is okay, because the movie is really, actually funny. The gags are silly and warm, and it’s all so goofy and earnest, and that suits the Muppets perfectly – thank god no one thought it’d be necessary to inject any sass or irony or heavy reliance on pop-culture references. (That said, there are a couple of things that are going to date this movie bad, including a chicken-clucked rendition of Cee Lo’s ‘Fuck You’ and cameos from Selena Gomez and, randomly, the fat kid from Modern Family.)

Aside from the classic ‘The Muppet Show Theme’ – that’s a great bit of music, isn’t it? It rivals The Simpsons‘ theme tune for its chaotic energy – there’s some terrific original numbers, many of them penned by Flight of the Conchords’ Bret McKenzie. The standouts are the super-catchy ‘Life’s a Happy Song’ and ‘Man or Muppet’ (whose performance is accompanied by one of the movie’s best surprise cameos).

It’ll give you the warm and fuzzies – warm and Fozzies? – to watch Kermit and Piggy and Gonzo and the rest together again. The Muppets‘ biggest achievement is the nostalgia is arouses.

But that’s maybe its biggest problem, too: this film wants to make the Muppets relevant again, but it attempts to do so by reminding us that the Muppets used to be relevant. There’s a lot of scenes where everyone sits around reminiscing about the Muppet heyday that won’t mean much to viewers – especially really young viewers – who aren’t as enamoured with these characters as Segal is. Sure, by the time it ends there’s no question that the Muppets were awesome. But the film doesn’t do a great job convincing us they’ll be awesome again, or that they deserve to be.

But it’s not like you’ll leave with the sense that they’ll never be awesome again. It won’t be a shock if the Muppets return to TV with a new variety series in the next couple of years. And there, in a format that’s their natural heartland, where all the characters can be properly re-explored instead of trotted out for brief appearances, they might really earn their place in modern pop-culture again.

The best argument against the existence of the supernatural is this: if all that stuff was real, someone would exploit it for profit. (There’s a great xkcd comic about it.) In Holly Black‘s series The Curse Workers, magic is real – and it’s exploited for profit.

Curse workers – those who possess the ability to alter memories, invade dreams, transform one thing into another, or other fantastic powers – rule New Jersey’s organised crime. Think The Sopranos with magic, but instead of a focus on Tony Soprano our hero is Cassel Sharpe, the youngest member of a worker family tangled up with a powerful mob syndicate.

White Cat, the first Curse Workers instalment, detailed Cassel’s discovery of his place within his family and the worker world. It was a great book, honestly, but felt light-weight despite its heavy themes – high on set-up, low on plot. But! All that establishment in White Cat means we know the rules coming into its sequel Red Glove, freeing Black up to get into the meaty stuff. And she gets right to the meaty stuff.

(Some spoilers ahead for White Cat.)

Cassel’s life is not so hot: he’s on the outs with his brothers after the events of White Cat, his mum has destroyed his love-life, and he’s being stalked by FBI agents keen on bringing down Jersey’s most powerful worker families. After one of his brothers is killed, Cassel has to choose what side of the law he wants to be on – while solving the murder, scamming his way out of trouble, and getting his schoolwork done.

Like White Cat there aren’t many surprises in the plot of Red Glove, but this time around it matters less. That’s because Black’s universe is so solid, thanks to her convincing exploration of the politics of a world where some people have magic (and where you’re pretty much assumed to be a criminal if you’re among them). One of the book’s best scenes is when Cassel and his friends attend a rally against laws that threaten to impose harsh restrictions on workers, and the protesters rip off their gloves to show their bare hands. Cassel is shocked; no one ever goes glove-less, for fear of exposing themselves to black magic. It’s a rich detail, with shades of the X-Men movies.

Black’s writing is spare and polished (there’s a clunker of a line about a woman wearing a jewel that looks like a drop of absinthe, but it only stands out because the rest of the text is so clean), and smart. A dumb writer would write a book about magic people in a magic world and have them do magic every other page. A smart writer – a smart writer like Holly Black – has her magic people do hardly any magic at all. Which means her story, for all its fantastic detail, is a human one. Which makes it that much more compelling.

Previously: Book review: White Cat, Holly Black

Minor spoilers ahead for Leviathan, Behemoth and Goliath.

So! Fresh off their adventures in Constantinople, our heroes Alek – secretly a prince – and Deryn – secretly a girl – venture to Siberia, Japan and then New York City in the flying warship Leviathan. On their quest the duo encounters several historical figures – including Nikolai Tesla, William Randolph Hearst and Pancho Villa – and finally confronts the romantic tension that’s been brewing between them the past two books.

Alek and Deryn are terrific characters, but Westerfeld’s greatest accomplishment is the world he’s built: set in the lead-up to World War I, the Leviathan trilogy pitches “Darwinists” (roughly equivalent to the Allied powers, who genetically engineer animals into terrifying war beasts) against “Clankers” (the Central powers, who battle with colossal hulking machines). There’s a lot going on here. It might’ve been laboured, or too complicated. But Westerfeld handles it all so cleverly!

Grown-ups will get into Goliath but be aware it falls squarely into the YA camp (never a bad thing, but some adults are weird about reading books “for” teens). Know a smart kid who you want to indoctrinate into the awesomeness of steampunk and alternate history and science-fiction? Give them this whole series.

If there’s a problem with Goliath, it’s that the story hints – and Westerfeld’s afterword makes it explicit – that 20th century history turns out very different because of Alek and Deryn. Their actions basically stop a world war. And that’s only a problem because World War I is this huge terrible epic thing, and the threat of it looms over all three books, but then it… doesn’t happen (or at least, happens on a much smaller scale than in our timeline). Which, on the one hand: yay, WWI averted, millions of lives spared. But on the other hand, from a narrative perspective, the climax loses some of its oomph.

But it’s a minor quibble. Especially since I don’t think this is the last we’ve seen of Alek and Deryn – or at least, not the last we’ve seen of the Darwinist/Clanker universe. With an entire century of history ready to be rewritten, Westerfeld’s got loads of territory left to explore. (Also, I want to see the perspicacious loris Bovril talking for reals.)

Lastly, major credit must go to Keith Thompson’s beautiful, lively illustrations, one of the true delights of all three books.

Previously: Book review: Leviathan, Scott Westerfeld, Book review: Behemoth, Scott Westerfeld

See #6

1. ‘Winter Wonderland’. The bridge of the song contains the following lyrics: “In the meadow we can build a snowman,/then pretend that he is Parson Brown./He’ll say ‘Are you married?’ We’ll say ‘No man,/but you can do the job when you’re in town!” In the period when this song was written, parsons (now known as Protestant ministers) often travelled among small rural towns to perform wedding ceremonies for denominational followers who did not have a local minister of their own faith.
2. Caganer. A caganer is a figurine appearing in nativity scenes in Catalonia and neighbouring areas with Catalan culture… The figure is depicted in the act of defecation.
3. Zwarte Piet. During recent years the role of Zwarte Pieten has become part of a recurring debate in the Netherlands. Controversial practices include holiday revellers blackening their faces, wearing afro wigs, gold jewellery and bright red lipstick, and walking the streets throwing candy to passers-by. Foreign tourists, particularly Americans, often experience culture shock upon encountering the character.
4. Reindeer in Christmas. According to the British comedy panel game QI, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and all of Santa’s other reindeer must be either female or castrated, because male reindeer lose their antlers during winter. (Snopes has a bit more on this.)
5. Christmas Eve. In [several European countries], Christmas presents are opened mostly on the evening of the 24th – this is also the tradition among the British Royal Family, due to their mainly German ancestry.
6. Santa Claus. Images of Santa Claus were further popularized through Haddon Sundblom’s depiction of him for The Coca-Cola Company’s Christmas advertising in the 1930s. The popularity of the image spawned urban legends that Santa Claus was invented by The Coca-Cola Company or that Santa wears red and white because they are the colors used to promote the Coca-Cola brand. Historically, Coca-Cola was not the first soft drink company to utilize the modern image of Santa Claus in its advertising. (Coca-Cola’s official website does claim the ads influenced Santa’s look, though.)
7. Jesus’ year of birth. Although Christian feasts related to the Nativity have had specific dates (eg, December 25 for Christmas) there is no historical evidence for the exact day or month of the birth of Jesus.
8. ‘Twelve Days of Christmas’. A bit of modern folklore claims that the song’s lyrics were written as a “catechism song” to help young Catholics learn their faith, at a time when practising Catholicism was criminalized in England (1558 until 1829). There is no primary evidence supporting this claim, and no evidence that the claim is historical, or “anything but a fanciful modern day speculation.” The theory is of relatively recent origin.
9. Three wise men. The Gospel of Matthew, the only one of the four Canonical gospels to mention the Magi, states that they came “from the east” to worship the Christ, “born King of the Jews.” Although the account does not tell how many they were, the three gifts led to a widespread assumption that they were three as well. In the East, the magi traditionally number twelve.
10. Boxing Day. The exact etymology of the term “boxing” is unclear and there are several competing theories, none of which is definitive.
11. Immaculate Conception. The Immaculate Conception of Mary is a dogma of the Roman Catholic Church, according to which the Virgin Mary was conceived without any stain of original sin. It is completely distinct from the virgin birth of Jesus, though it is a popular mistake to confuse them.
12. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. May considered naming the reindeer “Rollo” and “Reginald” before deciding upon using the name “Rudolph”.

And here’s the whole collection of interesting Wikipedia articles.

Remember that feeling after you finished school or university or college or whatever but before you got moved out into the Real Adult World? That feeling of being surrounded by an overwhelming number of opportunities, of being paralysed by the dread of choosing the wrong one, of not really being sure what was going to happen next, of wondering if this is really what life is meant to be like for the rest of forever, of not wanting to move forward but not forward but not wanting to stay? The Magician King is about that feeling. And magic.

(Some spoilers ahead for the prequel, The Magicians.)

Quentin Coldwater is a king of Fillory, the magical land from a series of books he adored as a child, which he discovered was real in the previous instalment. He’s growing fat and comfortable.

But Quentin being Quentin, he’s still unhappy. He wants more, and he gets it when he ventures out on a seemingly straightforward tax-collecting mission in Fillory’s farthest-flung tropical corners: circumstance tosses him and his co-royal Julia – his childhood friend who, you’ll remember, failed the entrance exam to magic academy Brakebills in The Magicians – back into the real world, where they stumble into a quest to save Fillory and magic itself.

The synopsis reads like standard magical-fantasy-land stuff, but Lev Grossman is awesome at blowing up your expectations of those kinds of stories. In Magicians he turned “boy finds out he’s magical, is educated in the ways of magic” tropes on their head. In Magician King he does the same for “boy finds out he must save the world”.

These books also address the realities of fantasy, as dumb as that sounds. If your teenage fantasies came true as an adult, you’d probably be pretty disappointed, as Quentin is. And, like Quentin, you’d soften the blow with layers of hip, disaffected cynicism and knowing pop-culture references. (You wouldn’t see Hermione using as iPhone, as King‘s Australian witch Poppy does)

And this attitude is important because, you know what, fantasy – if taken literally – is kind of lame. (I say that as a fantasy aficionado, FYI.) Grossman recognises this, which stops his work from falling into the twee trap of the classics he’s working with.

Like The Magicians, The Magician King meanders all over the place: Quentin visits Venice and talks to a dragon, then later descends into the underworld. He meets a sloth called Abigail along the way. It’s dreamlike, patched together, and it suits the story wonderfully.

Unlike its predecessor, King is not just about Quentin. Julia’s desperately sad, compelling backstory unfolds in tandem with the A-plot: these flashbacks to her magical education tell a dark, grimly satisfying tale with a devastating kick-in-the-balls climax. Julia’s magic is old and dangerous, nothing like Harry Potter or even grown-up stuff like True Blood: magic is barely under human control, and there are real consequences to using it. It’s fascinating.

I guess with sequels there’s always the question: is The Magician King better than The Magicians? But I don’t think the question even matters here. One is foundation, the other is build. Magicians was startlingly fresh, but Magician King enriches what we already know.

Grossman has confirmed there’s a third book coming (yay!) – he’s created too rich a universe not to explore further, and the end of King leaves Quentin’s story wide open. Like the magic in his books, the potential of Grossman’s fantasy world is near-limitless.

Previously: Book review: The Magicians, Lev Grossman