The Magicians: A Novel (original 2009; edition 2010)

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. ( )

Ouch. New Year's Resolution: Do not finish books you do not enjoy. This book was difficult to finish, but I wanted to participate in a book discussion about it, so determined to go the distance. The book is not without merit. When the eight main characters, four women, four men, complete their education in Brakebills School of Magic, they are whisked away to the Antarctic and travel as animals. The animal sex is diverting, and prefigures further sexual adventures that humans have a special talent for getting into trouble for.

There is just so much whining, and meta-pondering about the genre, about the purpose of life, about one book or another that influenced the main story, and then there is suddenly a huge amount of plot and action, interlarded with arcane vocabulary that is not gently woven into the prose, that I could not wait for the last page, and skimmed the final 50 or so. Also, there is an inordinate amount of drinking, making me worry about the author. ( )

Two stars only because the writing in itself was decent, if not mind-blowing.

What. A. Fucking. Mess.

Really, that was pretty awful. Quentin is horrendous. Alice is a non-character and has a complete personality reversal about midway through the book. Eliot is... what the fuck is Eliot supposed to be? This author vacillates between ripping off plot ideas from other books (for the first 200 pages I could buy that it was more of a pastiche or a sort of loving nod, but it quickly veered into total running-out-of-ideas-so-I'll-borrow-some territory) and just skipping large periods of time because he's not sure what to do. The plot was just plain ridiculous, boring, and non-existent and I'm not even sure how that's possible. And don't even get me STARTED on the characterisation. These people seem to exist for the purposes of the (non-)plot and have no real qualities inherent to themselves. Apart from Alice, until the Fillory incident. SIGH. The first 200 pages were easily worth 3.5 stars, maybe even four and then it all falls apart so spectacularly that I almost ended up hating it completely. ( )