PositiveThe Kenyon Review...The Magician King follows Quentin Coldwater and his friends on their adventures through an imagined world called 'Fillory,' as well as a magical, booze-infused underground on good old Earth. And like its predecessor, The Magician King (just out in paperback) is surprisingly, almost subversively ambitious ...both engages with and defies the genre, and in doing so kicks down the imaginary partition separating fantasy from not-fantasy (otherwise known as serious literary big-boy writing) ... If all Grossman was after was a Potteresque adventure that upped the MPAA from PG-13 to R, I’d still be along for the ride. Thankfully he’s set his sights a good deal higher than that ...peoples both books with a cast of brilliant and broken young men and women.
