The Magicians by Lev Grossman

A thrilling and original coming-of- age novel about a young man practicing magic in the real worldQuentin Coldwater is brilliant but miserable. A senior in high school, he’s still secretly preoccupied with a series of fantasy novels he read as a child, set in a magical land called Fillory. Imagine his surprise when he finds himself unexpectedly admitted to a very secret, very exclusive college of magic in upstate New York, where he receives a thorough and rigorous education in the craft of modern sorcery.He also discovers all the other things people learn in college: friendship, love, sex, booze, and boredom. Something is missing, though. Magic doesn’t bring Quentin the happiness and adventure he dreamed it would. After graduation he and his friends make a stunning discovery: Fillory is real. But the land of Quentin’s fantasies turns out to be much darker and more dangerous than he could have imagined. His childhood dream becomes a nightmare with a shocking truth at its heart.At once psychologically piercing and magnificently absorbing, The Magicians boldly moves into uncharted literary territory, imagining magic as practiced by real people, with their capricious desires and volatile emotions. Lev Grossman creates an utterly original world in which good and evil aren’t black and white, love and sex aren’t simple or innocent, and power comes at a terrible price.

A pageturner, for sure. A nearly-grown-up malcontent escapé from the Gifted and Talented track makes his way to a magic school and then to not!Narnia? Sign me up!

The prose is tight, fun, unique, and rollicking. The worldbuilding is interesting – it knowingly sacrifices originality for wink-and-nudge callbacks, referencing Harry Potter, Narnia, Lord of the Rings, Earthsea, and (possibly) the film Pan's Labyrinth. The imagery was often extremely vivid, and immersive – I often felt like I was physically there, on the welters court, in a snowfield, cruising at altitude above the world. And I wanted desperately, at all times, to know what would happen next.

In the end, though, I was left feeling cold. Quentin didn't seem to experience much personal growth through the 400-some pages of the book, despite going through incredible numbers of unique and challenging experiences over four or five years in total. However, he seemd to accrue only trauma, and little wisdom, by the end of the book. I found him more difficult to like the more time passed in the story; surely, I kept thinking, now he'll begin to grow as a person. But it never really happened.

The other characters often felt thinly written, too. They were so dynamic that I wanted to know more about their inner lives, but these were only ever hinted at. They seemed to exist mostly as foils to or supports for Quentin, which in the case of Alice was particularly disappointing, given how her story ultimately shook out.

I enjoyed this, but I'm not sure I'd recommend it.

Would you be happy if you suddenly had everything you ever wanted? That question lies at the core of “The Magicians,” which is, if nothing else, a serious page-turner. It reads like Harry Potter, if Harry was an angsty teenager and these pages were his LiveJournal (Quentin is feeling: Dissatisfied). I felt that all of the rip-offs (sorry, “references”) were not exactly well-earned, despite the story's attempt to position itself for a more adult, post-YA reader base. The book's strongest points are curiously at odds, with Grossman's wonderfully inventive imagination constantly being desaturated by his dismayingly-realistic portrayal of a young adult in the throes of depression. The book's final chapters follow a fantastic plot twist with a extra-large heaping of indifference, and by the final pages I was left wondering why I should care about where the plot was going, when certainly no one else was.