The store should have been empty, coming up on nine o’clock on a cold rainy Thursday night, but instead it was full of people. It didn’t matter where you were, if you were in a room full of books you were at least halfway home. He pushed his way back through the racks of greeting cards and cat calendars, back to where the actual books were, his glasses steaming up and his coat dripping on the thin carpet. It was a bookstore, and he felt at home in bookstores, and he hadn’t had that feeling much lately. That’s how un-charming this store was: it had a crow in a cage. The only unexpected touch was a wire birdcage in one corner, but where you would have expected a parrot or a cockatoo inside there was a fat blue-black bird instead. Inside you could still hear the noise of cars on the wet road, like long strips of paper tearing, one after another. The enormous bearded cashier didn’t look up from his phone when the door jingled. Satisfied, Quentin crossed the parking lot. This was just another strip-mall outpost of a struggling chain, squeezed in between a nail salon and a Party City, twenty minutes outside Hackensack off the New Jersey Turnpike. Not one of your charming, quirky bookstores, with a ginger cat on the windowsill and a shelf of rare signed first editions and an eccentric, bewhiskered proprietor behind the counter. Quentin spent fifteen minutes watching it from a bus shelter at the edge of the empty parking lot, rain drumming on the plastic roof and making the asphalt shine in the streetlights. It wasn’t much of a night for it: early March, drizzling and cold but not quite cold enough for snow. Having the courage to do the former and the intelligence to absorb the latter defines Quentin's path.The letter had said to meet in a bookstore. Through Quentin, Grossman offers his own take: that much of growing up is learning what you can fix and accepting what you can't. Throughout this series, and particularly with the final installment, he hits on big themes: There are meditations on loss, on growing up, the nature of friendship and people's ceaseless, and often fruitless, desire to fix and control things. The overall effect is to force Quentin to reckon with who he is and the magician he has become. Fans of the first two books will enjoy the winks and nods to the earlier story, which mostly manage to seem organic and purposeful, not nostalgic.
The well-rendered set piece that follows - delivered in a breathless, cinematic style - puts the novel in motion and starts a series of events that will bring Quentin into contact with everyone and everything that have ever mattered to him.
There, a motley crew that includes the intriguing new character Plum, a former student of Quentin's, is plotting a magical heist. That leads him to a dreary hotel in New Jersey. The experience has pushed him back to his alma mater, Brakebills, where he is serving as an adjunct professor until something goes wrong. "Land" begins where "The Magician King" left off: Quentin is in exile, shorn of his magical title and abruptly booted from Fillory by a feckless god. With a wag of the wand, Grossman creates whole worlds and a genre more or less to himself. Weave in real elements of loss and mourning and human emotion.
Take some elements of Harry Potter or "The Chronicles of Narnia," to which this book pays deep homage, and mix in the traditional coming-of-age novel. Beginning with "The Magicians," author Lev Grossman sought to write something that seemed contradictory: an adult (read: literary) novel about magic. It presents themes and allusions that have evolved and improved across three books, much like their chief protagonist. Which is not to say "Land" won't stand on its own merits. Everything to follow - the magical buttons, the flying carpets, the talking animals, the confounding and mysterious Chatwin family - will make so much more sense after absorbing the mythos. Read "The Magicians" and "The Magician King" both for the welcome backfill of information and the sheer pleasure of their adventures. For those who haven't read the first two books, it's best to stop here. The final installment doesn't disappoint, bringing Quentin's saga to a satisfying, deeply felt conclusion.