The Magician’s Land by Lev Grossman is the perfect ending to his Magicians trilogy. I would say that it’s not the ending I expected, but I honestly had no idea what to expect. It’s not a typical happy ending, but that’s a good thing—a happy ending would betray the entire concept of the trilogy. So the ending isn’t fairy tale happy, but it’s very satisfying. It leaves the reader and the characters satiated, without any pandering or overly cheery false notes.

In retrospect, it takes on an appearance of inevitability. Having read it, it now feels like the only ending possible. It rings true.

The Magician’s Land is both grand in scope and strangely mundane. But that mundanity is also what makes it profound.

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The Magician King by Lev Grossman is as good as I wanted the first book in this series to be.

The big flaw with The Magicians was that toying with the genre sometimes overshadowed telling the story. That’s not the case with this second book. The parameters of Mr. Grossman’s magical world are already defined and the genre gimmicks are already established. There’s no need to rehash them and so he doesn’t.

Which means that The Magician King can focus on simply telling a good story. The storytelling in this novel is more cohesive and coherent than its predecessor, and as a result it’s much more powerful and effective.

The Magician King has the substance that the premise of the first book promised but mostly failed to deliver.

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Honestly, I had hoped to like The Magicians by Lev Grossman more than I do. I like it a lot and I greatly enjoyed reading it. But I’d heard so many wonderful things from people who adore this book (and the trilogy) that I expected to be blown away by it.

I wasn’t.

I really like Mr. Grossman’s take on the “young magician” fantasy trope. I appreciate that he makes it much darker, a whole lot messier, and that he recasts this genre through the lens of cynical realism. It’s very effective. His riffs on Harry Potter and his criticisms of C.S. Lewis’ Narnia series are delightful and on point.

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Recently, I was lucky enough to get my hands on an Advance Reader’s Edition of Neal Stephenson’s upcoming novel, Seveneves.

There are certain people—artists, writers, performers, musicians—who are so breathtakingly good, such absolute masters of their craft, that I can only stand in awe of their work and think:

It’s not fair. No one has the right to be this talented.

This is especially true every time I read a novel from Mr. Stephenson. Seveneves proves once again that he possesses an imagination of staggering inventiveness and scope. For him, an event that most of us would find unthinkable is where he starts the story.

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Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie is less engaging than its predecessor. It’s a decent SF novel and I enjoyed reading it. But it wasn’t nearly as exciting or as compelling as Ancillary Justice.

I ended my review of Ms. Leckie’s first book with a note of confusion—it was a great novel but I couldn’t understand how it was great enough to have won all of the awards that it did. Even so, the second installment in her Imperial Radch series doesn’t live up to the expectations placed on it by that first novel.

There are two major shifts from the first novel in the series to this one:

1. The scope of the second book is much narrower.
2. The main character is portrayed in a very different light.

I’ll start with the changes that we see in Justice of Toren One Esk Nineteen / Breq Mianaai.

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Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie has been on my “To Read” list since it swept all of the major SF awards last year. I enjoyed it tremendously.

This is old-fashioned space opera, reminiscent of the classics of the Golden Age. Unlike a lot of modern space opera (which I adore, for the record) Ms. Leckie is less concerned with the technology that makes galaxy- and time-spanning civilization possible and offers us a story focused on character and plot.

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