Julia’s years of solitude and brooding misery, while Quentin was off at the magical equivalent of Brown (or maybe Wesleyan?), are deemed intriguing enough to make up over a third of the chapters. Life in the margins of the magical world has left her troubled and mysterious-at least to Quentin, who had a thing for Julia in the first book before he got to Brakebills and met Alice (now out of the picture), and at this point has a thing for her once again. This time around, much of the space is given to Julia, who had to teach herself magic after she failed the Brakebills entrance test. Those readers that found Fillory boring, and were therefore not as excited by the final third of The Magicians, will not love The Magician King. The Magician King picks up right where The Magicians left off: Quentin, Eliot, Janet and Julia are kings and queens in the magical land of Fillory, which they discovered after graduating from Brakebills College, a sort of hipper Hogwarts. The existence of this sequel-it turns out it will be a trilogy, in fact-does not ruin the memory of the original, but certainly dims it a bit. The Magician King, Lev Grossman’s sequel to his inventive, exciting novel The Magicians, lacks the je ne sais quoi of its predecessor (actually, we can certainly begin to enumerate the ‘quoi’ of The Magicians-it included: heart in a protagonist that at first look didn’t have much, fantasy that never felt childish, and a romance that was anything but predictable). In other words: if a story was liked by readers, and praised by critics, and there’s an opening to continue it, then why not write another? Fuck it, let’s make another one!’) but in the publishing world, the decision likely rests on the “wisdom of crowds” concept ( holler, James Surowiecki). In the film business, the cause is usually greed (‘Hey,’ offers up some executive, ‘Cars made good money. An ill-advised sequel has ruined the legacy of many a wonderful story.