Reviewing Lev Grossman's Magician Series Before Starting Third Book

Many of the different series of books that I have read over recent years were already completely written by the time I began with them, making the process of covering them all relatively quick, with little time between books for me to forget characters or various aspects of the story line...Stephen Kind's Dark Tower series is an example for me.  Then again, there are other series for which the author is still writing new books every few years or so...George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire is a case in point.  For these series, I have experienced the need to review the previous books before I begin on the next, newly published installment.  This also applies to the new (and presumably final) book in Lev Grossman's Magician series, the third book of which , titled The Magician's Land, has just come out and which I just got from Amazon on my Kindle.

I have just finished rereading the first book, titled The Magicians, and will start on book #2, The Magician King, tonight.  This is a great fantasy series with characters of depth and refreshingly rooted in our "real" world instead of the typical make-believe continents with the obscure, hard-to-read maps and "epic", convoluted history.  Not that Grossman hasn't inserted his own imaginary land into the story in Fillory (which he clearly and deliberately has fashioned after C.S. Lewis' Narnia), but the characters are based in our own world and time frame.

I'm glad I'm going through this review of the first two books in the series. Had I not, I know I would have been missing out on many details that will probably be referred back to in the new book...