From that day forward she never used my name. Eventually I forgot it. Mrs. H called me something new. She named me cruel and smirking, she named me not for beauty or for cleverness or for sweetness. She named me a thing I could aspire to but never become, the one thing I was not and could never be: Snow White.
Well that was most certainly a book.
Take (the vague outline) the story of Snow White. Make it a Western. Things get weird.
It didn’t matter where you were, if you were in a room full of books you were at least halfway home.
In The Magicians, we had half Harry Potter but cynical and half Narnia… but cynical. In The Magician King, we mostly stuck around in Fillory (the Narnia analogue). But right at the end… our well loved (:sarcasm:) main character Quentin pays the ultimate price: he doesn’t get to hang out in the magical land anymore and has to go home.
The Magician’s Land picks up from there, with one plot following Quentin as he settles back into a normal life, becomes a teacher, promptly gets fired, and descends to a life of crime. As one does.
On the other hand, we have the (new and improved?) Kings and Queens of Fillory dealingw ith their own sort of armageddon. Turns out saving magic… wasn’t enough?
Hulks! Maestro!
Apparently in all the wacky parallel universe shenanigans, Maestro “rescued” a bunch of Hulks and brought them back to this world.
Knowing basically nothing about how Maestro came to be or what all these Hulks can actually do, it’s a strange story.
That was the thing about the world: it wasn’t that things were harder than you thought they were going to be, it was that they were hard in ways that you didn’t expect.
Turns out, if you take The Magicians, tone down Quentin a bit, and cut the magic school parts to focus mostly on Fillory and adventuring, you get a much better book. It’s still a bit much at times and definitely has some ‘middle book syndrome’ going on, but I quite enjoyed it.
If you didn’t like the Magicians, you might like this book. If you liked it, particularly the second half, this is probably right up your alley.
Memories of the past/future…
And he wants to go back.
This can’t possibly go well.
Especially when none of his “friends” will help, so he has to turn to darker sources.
What we end up with is Logan bouncing (again) through time, reliving his old adventures for a few pages at a time, unable to change anything that matters.
It’s an interesting idea, but once again it doesn’t really have time to breath. All too soon, we’re back to the status quo.
Well that was fun. I’m always looking for a good new (to me) Urban Fantasy–and Jane Yellowrock (so far) hits all the right notes. The worldbuilding is neat. The plot is basic enough, but solid. I like the main character(s). And I’m looking forward to seeing where it goes from here!
I think the biggest/really only negative with the book is that the writing style starts out fairly rough. It evens out fairly quickly though, so I expect it’s more of both the author and the reader finding the voice of the book than anything else.
I got my heart’s desire, and there my troubles began.
Well. The majority of comments certainly nailed this one. Two interesting premises in a trenchcoat wrapped in the guise of cynicism and dark humor, underscored by the most depressed to the point of hard to read main character I think I’ve read in a long time.
Interesting enough I’ll give the sequel a try (I really liked the ending twists(ish)). I wish it were better.
Dracula is calling to the Vampires. All of them.
Which, for some reason includes Jubilee. Which Logan, having killed here once seems to take personal.
Comics are weird sometimes.
Old Man Logan—on the trail of Lady Deathstrike—goes to Japan. Only to square off another piece of goes future past.
It’s fascinating seeing Logan’s past, everything between when the villains took over and when he got sent to the Battleworlds, intermixed with the current present.
Fascinating… and bloody. But that’s Wolverine for you.
So… what’s the Japanese word for Bub exactly?
Old Man Logan is in the past… but it’s not his past.
Fearing what could come, he goes to the one place be feels he can do the most good: to guard his future wife?
Yeah… I’m not sure what else he thought might happen.
Luckily, a few big fights, a pile of blood and bodies, and a visit with a young old friend later and he seems to get the idea.
Onward!