The Magician King
Lev Grossman
 Bored with ruling the magical realm of Fillory with his co-rulers Eliot, Janet and Julia, the magician king Quentin looks for an adventure to give his life some meaning. He commissions a ship and travels with Julia, his distant and damaged former love interest, to the Outer Island to collect back taxes from the region. Once there, Quentin stumbles across a fairy tale regarding seven golden keys. The search for one of the keys on a nearby island accidentally sends Quentin and Julia back to Earth with seemingly no way to return to Fillory. The attempt to return becomes Quentin and Julia's new, unintended quest. On Earth, Quentin and Julia team up with Josh and his friend Poppy, who try to aid them in their return. Along the way, their journey grows more complicated as they discover an even deeper quest with dire implications for magic users everywhere, and the four magicians are drawn into Fillory to help in the fateful search for the golden keys. Julia's backstory unfolds in parallel to Quentin's current adventures. Starting with her failed entrance exam to Brakebills, the elite magical college Quentin attended, Julia founders in depression, desperately seeking anything that can bring magic back into her life. After years of painstaking research and working her way up the hierarchy of a secret society of hedge witches, Julia eventually attains enough magical skill to catch the eye of an elite group of genius-level magicians who practice magic outside the closed world of the magical colleges. The group becomes like a family to her and trains her further in the magical arts. Things go awry, however, when the group decides on a powerful summoning in an attempt to further their magical learning, and the subsequent events leave Julia transformed.