If the grueling rigor of Brakebills—the hand positions, lab work, oral exams with Dean Fogg, and the way Quentin’s cohort forms under pressure—hooked you, you’ll love how The Name of the Wind plunges Kvothe into the University’s unforgiving arcana. The tuition scrambles, rivalries, and dangerously clever problem-solving echo Quentin cramming sigils before Finals, but with Rothfuss’s own meticulous system (sympathy, naming) and academic politics that feel as tense as any duel.

If the ache of Fillory—finding the button, stepping through, and then facing the hollow after—stayed with you, Every Heart a Doorway zeroes in on that feeling. At Eleanor West’s school, teens who’ve returned from their own Fillorys and Netherworlds wrestle with purpose and grief, much like Quentin and Julia do after their first taste of elsewhere. It blends wonder with melancholy and a sharp mystery, asking the same question Grossman does: what do you do after the door closes?

If you were compelled by Quentin, Eliot, and the Brakebills crowd—brilliant, privileged, and sliding from witty parties in Brooklyn to catastrophic decisions in Fillory—then The Secret History is that moral spiral with the magic stripped away. Tartt’s classics students chase transcendence and wind up with a body, a secret, and a slow unspooling guilt that mirrors the Magicians’ hedonism and complicity after the Beast. It’s the same intoxicating cocktail of elitism, charisma, and ruin.

If you appreciated the way The Magicians leavens bleakness—grisly encounters with the Beast, brutal consequences—with razor-edged banter, The Library at Mount Char hits that nerve. Carolyn and her "siblings" are apprenticed to a godlike Father in catalogs of impossible knowledge, and the humor is as pitch-black as any Eliot one-liner thrown after disaster. It’s violent, weird, and mordantly funny, with the same willingness to let power get truly, horribly messy.

If Quentin and Alice’s choices in Fillory—tapping dangerous power and living with what it breaks—stuck with you, The Poppy War pushes that ethical edge to the brink. Rin’s ascent from academy prodigy to shamanic weapon forces the kind of lines-in-the-sand decisions that echo the Magicians’ final confrontation with the Beast. The exhilaration of mastery meets atrocity, asking, as Grossman does, whether the price of power can ever be justified.