This is a genuinely weird book, on a conceptual level, like a careful experiment that produces a mutant creation that is compelling, but with nothing useful to actually say. It's well-written, for sure, full of great ideas and brilliant scenes. It has no plot as such, until more than halfway-through. It has a central character who, no matter what he thinks or says or does, is never actully a protagonist. Even in the climactic battle, he's sidelined, and the person who could have emerged as the real protagonist wins through by sacrificing herself, reducing her to yet another emotional burden for Quentin.

Mostly, the central character keeps getting what he wants almost despite himself, and then remaining unhappy and even sabotaging his happiness. (A Secret History gets invoked a lot, but I'd put good money on Infinite Jest being much more of a model for Brakebills and its students.) He wanders through a series of updated childrens' fantasy stories, rich and gifted and priveleged and entitled but ridiculously disstisfied, and every now and then somone points out how terrible that is, actually, and yet it never seems to matter. It's infantile young people wallowing in infantile fantasies and only intermittently showing glmpses of something more grown-up and mature, but doomed to remain mired in unhappy unstaisfying nostalgia, commenting ironically and caustically on the obviously Narnian/Potterian/D&D nature of things and failing completely to create a new type of fantasy where they would actually fit in, rather than constantly being in a state of unresolved mismatch between characters and settings. Once they graduate from their amazing magical school, they literally have nothing to do with their secret magical abilities until one of them blunders on a plot coupon and they go rushing  off to have a dumb childhood adventure in another world and become kings and queens over a presumably agreeable and gratfeul populace. It's actually pathetic, and it's supposed to be, I suppose, but the irony has nowhere to go except to eat itself.

There's a gesture towards something more real and scary and challenging in the final confrontation with the Beast, but then it resets to wallowing in mllennial discontent that cannot be allieviated by the wonders of magic and adventure, most of which are in forms that belong to a previous century, but incapable of finding forms that are actually meaningful to them, and to which they are meaningful. I suspect the rest of the trilogy reiterates this over and over again. Not sure I'll bother.

The Bright Sword was MUCH better.