I Want to Read This Book

On my flight home from my parents' house, I read The Magicians (and stayed up until about 2:00 a.m. to finish it once I got here), a book about an uber-genius guy who goes to a secret magic college. (Thanks, Tam!) I was pleased that it was not very much like the Harry Potter series, though many a nod was made at those books, particularly in the form of sarcastic comments about quidditch and whatnot from students in the book who are well aware of the general conception of magic school = Harry Potter. The book also draws on other children's fantasy classics like The Chronicles of Narnia, Alice, and The Once and Future King. (Thankfully, the nihilistic Bright Lights, Big City period of drugs and sex was short. I really disliked that book.) References to Dungeons & Dragons, Star Wars, Star Trek, The Lord of the Rings, and other geek-lit is sprinkled without; a characteristic example: "Josh speculated about the hypothetical contents of an imaginary porn magazine for intelligent trees that would be entitled Enthouse."

In place of Narnia, this universe has a series of Christian fantasy stories set in the land of Fillory. The description of one of these books starts out unpromisingly:

"...The Wandering Dune, the fifth and last book in the series... On entering Fillory, the two girls encounter a mysterious sand dune being blown through the kingdom, all by itself. They climb the dune and find themselves riding it through the green Fillorian countryside and out onto a dreamy desert wasteland in the far south, where they spend most of the rest of the book.

Almost nothing happens. Jane and Helen fill up the pages with interminable conversations about right and wrong and teenage Christian metaphysics and whether their true obligations lie on Earth or in Fillory..."

But then, my heart starts racing:

"In the end the sisters are picked up by a majestic clipper ship that sails through the sand as if it were water. The ship is crewed by large bunnies who would be overly cutesy (the Wandering Dune-haters always compared them to Ewoks) if it weren't for their impressively hard-assed attention to the technical details of operating their complex vessel."

Ship, sand, technically-competent rabbits! Later, we learn that the girls "receive a gift from Highbound, the captain of the rabbit-crewed clipper ship that the girls encounter in the dessert. The gift is a little brass-bound oak chest containing five magical buttons..."

You know Highbound (which is a terrific rabbit name) is a complete bad-ass.

I really want to read the story of these rabbits and their ship. I'm thinking 5 parts Richard Adams (Watership Down), 3 parts Lost flashbacks, and 2 parts Tom Clancy (The Hunt for Red October).