The following podcast contains explicit language.

The Slate Audio Book Club is sponsored by The Great Courses, engaging video and audio lectures taught by top professors.

Courses like The Art of Storytelling, which provides tools to help everyone enhance their own storytelling skills.

Get 80% off the original price for a limited time when you visit the greatcourses.com

slash book club.

Welcome to the Slate Audio Book Club's discussion of The Magicians Land by Lev Grossman.

I'm Dan Cois, the editor of the Slate Book Review, and I'm here in Slate's New York

Recording Studio.

Joining me here are two special guests to the audiobook club.

First, Slate Assistant Editor Miriam Kruill.

Hey, Miriam. Hi, Dan. And we're also joined by the co-founder of the all and the author of very recent history, Corey Sika. Hi, Corey. Hi, everyone. And Dan and Miriam. So, as is always the case with the audiobook club, we will be spoiling things that have happened in this book, the third book of the Magicians trilogy by Lev Grossman.

So if you are a person who doesn't want to get spoiled, please read the book first and then come back and listen to us.

We are not going anywhere.

We will remain right here in your iPhone or SoundCloud window.

So The Magicians Land is the third in the Magicians trilogy, which was best described initially maybe as Harry Potter but with sex and booze,

but which has changed quite a bit throughout the three books of the trilogy. In this third volume,

The Magical Land of Fillory is dying, and King Elliot and Queen Janet searched the land for a way to save it.

Meanwhile, Quentin, the series' ostensible main character, is back on earth searching for a purpose, and the purpose he eventually lands on is trying to bring back Alice has lost love, who in the first book transformed into a kind of demon called a Niffin, a magical being of pure blue light and hate. I want to talk about a lot of things in our conversation today in the book and in the series as a whole.

And among them, I want to talk about how Grossman's views of heroism and maturity seem to have evolved over the course of the series. I want to talk about Quentin's return to breakbills, the magical school that we first explored in book one. I want to talk about the new character in this book, Plum, an expelled breakbill student and the last remaining descendant of the Chatwin family, the family who first discovered Filleri. But I thought we might start by just surveying some of the major characters one by one and talking a little bit about the past that they take. And through that, we can start to figure out how we all felt about this book, which I think we all had a lot of different feelings about this book. Let's start as you do in your slate review that was published

this summer, Corey, with Julia. You make the argument in your review that Julia is really at the

heart of the whole trilogy and that she is Lev Grossman's sort of true avatar in the books. And I think

that that is really true. I mean,

...