The Magicians (original 2009; edition 2009)

I didnt like this too much. It felt like harry potter but without the magic. ( )

I loved it for the first 300 pages, to the point I repeatedly declared this was the best book ever, and then it went all sword-and-sorcery and spun out of control. I knew it had to go that way eventually but I had higher hopes for how Lev Grossman would treat it or how I would tolerate it. I tolerate fantasy a lot better in children's books than in adult ones and I had lost patience with the Narnian critters well before the Tolkien demon showed up. And the ending was unresolved in an unsatisfactory way -- I can handle books that don't give a happy ending with all threads raveled, but this just felt like a gaping sequel-ready hole that allowed the protagonist to avoid the honest, existential issues that had confronted him.

I loved it because it stole from Narnia and reminded me of Pamela Dean's Tam Lin (school, loving school, not wanting to leave school, the "anticipatory nostalgia" before graduation, all of which I empathize with) and Mysterious Benedict Society (the examination) and Earthsea (having to know the balance of magic and adjust it to the world) and Winter's Tale (the mysterious place in upstate New York) and Secret History (the cloistering of those who specialize in something arcane). I love that Harry Potter books existed in this world to be mocked (that spells consisted of more than messed up Latin, that something was going to arrive in a chariot pulled by a threstral, welters as quidditch). I love that Grossman had someone use a phrase from Infinite Jest (the "howling fantods"). I love that Quentin's reaction to humanity after leaving the centaurs was like Gulliver's upon leaving the Houyhnhnms.

Nitpicks: Almost all the prose was lovely and alliterative but occasionally it squinted or had proofreading errors: "It took Quentin a minute for his eyes to adjust," "inspite," and a piece of sentence that ran "[subject:] did a lot of for [object:]."

One bit where Grossman revealed himself to be a New Yorker's New Yorker was when the group was in the different upstate New York place, where they were within a day's easy out-and-back driving distance to Buffalo for errands yet east of the Adirondacks (they watched the sun set behind the mountains).

Beware: this is not a cheery book. And its ending is bitter.

It is not about magic as an adventure, it is about the costs of magic. It is all about pain, and self-destruction, and disillusionment.

The first half of the book is a more realistic Harry Potter without the adventure. The second half of the book has an adventure, but with horrific consequences. The hero is driven by a desire to find a point to his existence, and a point to his powers, but all he finds is bitterness and sorrow.

I can't imagine why there are more books in this series. ( )

Readers of my reviews would know by now that I’m not a big fan of fantasy books. I can handle time travel (like the Outlander series) and Harry Potter, but not much else. Maybe I’m just lazy when it comes to learning strange new worlds; maybe I can only handle the world we live in. So when the leader of my book club sold this as a ‘grumpier Harry Potter with drinking’, I was interested because you can never have enough Harry Potter, right?

Not really. Quentin is nothing like Harry Potter – he’s eternally morose and on the outer with the real world, so when he finds out that he is a magician and has been accepted to an otherworldly college, you would think he’d be happy. But he’s not. He’s still stressed, obsessing over spells, girls, strange events and what it all means. Plus, he can’t lose his childhood dream that the Fillory fantasy books are real. Nobody believes him until later, when some of his friends start investigating magically whether Fillory is real. This starts them off on a new tangent (other than smoking, sex and drinking, which they seem to do a lot of) which has huge consequences.

For me, this is an odd book. It starts off like Harry going to Hogwarts (but an adult version), which I really enjoyed. Then after Quentin leaves college, it’s really boring – little happens except he and all his friends drink and sleep around. Then, they use their magic to find themselves in a fantasy world, which is like those Final Fantasy battles over and over. After this, everything seems to normalise and the book looks like it’s about to end. Unfortunately, the actual ending really made me want to throw the book against the wall and scream to Quentin, “Did you not learn ANYTHING?”

Quentin’s not a likeable guy – he doesn’t seem excited or satisfied by anything, even when his biggest fantasies turn out to be true. He just shrugs and slouches off to the next thing to get cranky over. There are more interesting, quirky characters than him, but unfortunately they all get be killed off. In the end, I thought Quentin was a dill – and I didn’t really care whether he made the same mistakes again. (There is a sequel to this book, which I don’t plan on reading – it’s called The Magician King. I just read the synopses to see if my suspicions were right).

I found the battle sequences incredibly drawn out and hard to keep track of. The fact that I didn’t really care for most of the characters doing battle didn’t help. It would have been nicer if they were faster paced and different instead of enemy-fight-defeat and repeat. The narrative gets quite dark in this section – it would have been useful to have a lighter plot thread running concurrently to escape from the battle monotony.

Grossman does have some cool thoughts about magic – some of his thoughts on the basis of magic almost make sense! There’s no eye of a newt here – it’s all quite ‘scientific’. The college lessons were my favourite where the students were learning the spells.

Unfortunately, this book doesn’t do anything to change my idea of fantasy, just reinforce the parts I don’t like. It’s a pity, because the magician college idea is a good one, but the novel just lacked happiness.

http://samstillreading.wordpress.com ( )

Unexpected. If I had to pick one word to describe this book, that would be it. Exert time I thought I had even the vaguest idea of where the story was going, something unexpected happened. I couldn't stop trying to guess what would happen next and failing at it.

This isn't your standard fantasy. It's an oxymoron. It's a 'real' fantasy. There are characters you'll like, characters you'll hate, and characters that'll make you say WTF? The writer tells the story with enough detail to get you into the world the characters live in but not so much that it distracts you from it.

I wasn't sure about this one but I decided to give it a shot and I was pleasantly surprised by the result. It was a good read. ( )