The premise is great, high school age kids with "talent" are screened for admission to what is basically Brakebill's College of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Okay, so it's derivative - complete with a crazy magic sport called welters to fill the slot occupied by quidditch in the original. Still, I liked the way that students were recruited and tested; it definitely had potential.
Grossman goes on, though, apparently not having an original thought to his name, to create a full clone of Narnia, a Narnia which has fallen on evil times and must be rescued. Sound familiar?
Everything is much less pleasant than either of the originals, and has far less significance when compared to the subtext of Narnia. Our hero(?) returns to the mundane world and takes up a job in the tradition of graduates of Brakebill - that is, sitting in an office doing nothing and receiving a large salary for it. In the end, the other adventurers who survived the trip to Fillory (the Narnia clone) come back and beg him to join them in sitting on the four thrones of Fillory (again, sound familiar?). And to cap it all, to my mind, it ends ambiguously. Did he join them or did he step out of his umpteenth floor window to commit suicide? And, you know what? I don't really care.
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