2022 reread: I love all my children equally, meaning this trilogy. On a second re read though, I must say I found this even more enjoyable. The first book is still the most “literary” to me, but the amount of growth and the messaging in this book being as nuanced as it is—bundled into a magical heist to boot—really resonated with me. A lot of people think Lev Grossman is just shitting on Narnia/portal fantasy, and the messaging there, but that’s pretty disingenuous. There is a deep love and value of escapism and the role it plays in the characters, but they also develop beyond that because that is not enough, in the long-term, to function well enough. It is a bandaid or the start of something. It is not the end, because fantasy, when pierced with verisimilitude, always are a bubble that burst, and there are so many reasons to keep going when it does. Growing up doesn’t mean the fantasy is over, it means it needs to evolve beyond the simplistic. And that complexity is the stuff of life, to strive for. It’s the magic of actually growing up.

I enjoyed this a lot more with the reread. It’s far more apparent how thematically appropriate everything is and it feels much better paced for the simple fact that I knew why everything was pertinent, when before some parts felt like they were just there.

Again, the strength of the series is that the author wanted to communicate something important about himself, imo. About growing up and the nature of things, but especially about what kind of a person believes in fairy tales and magic. Most importantly, why a fantasy like these can matter so much while at the same time being critical of the fiction and ourselves. It’s mostly successful.

Like everything there are some blind spots; specifically with a couple of the women who feel a bit too much like they exist for the purposes of the protagonist. But there’s a luminal space there because the books are unabashedly from his perspective (except for a few chapters from some of the others, but mostly it’s all Q, all the way through).

The ending, after reading all of them in a row, actually feels perfect this time too. There are some nice subversions, some badass stuff. Character arcs happening for more than just Q. A cyclical tidiness that plays out throughout that is extremely satisfying at the very end. It might actually beat out the first one, even though I really like how the first one is a freakish mix of literary/contemporary and portal genre fiction.