The Magicians (The Magicians, #1)

Oct 26, 2011 Emilie rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 11, mythic-fiction, ya

emi: mr. grossman, i am here representing the commonwealth of language and literature. i regret to inform you that i am revoking your simile license.

grossman:but. but, that is like ...

emi:don't do it, sir. one more simile and i can have you arrested. you have shown a gross negligence.

grossman:well, who are you to talk?! you abuse the common comma!

emi:i do admit to an indulgence with the comma, but i am not charging people to read my writing. if i were to publish a novel, i'd work with someone c...more emi: mr. grossman, i am here representing the commonwealth of language and literature. i regret to inform you that i am revoking your simile license.

grossman:but. but, that is like ...

emi:don't do it, sir. one more simile and i can have you arrested. you have shown a gross negligence.

grossman:well, who are you to talk?! you abuse the common comma!

emi:i do admit to an indulgence with the comma, but i am not charging people to read my writing. if i were to publish a novel, i'd work with someone called an editor.

grossman:you can't do this to me! i am...this is like--

emi /walks away/

i don't remember the last time i read a book that i hated so much. this is less than one star material and i wish i wasn't so compulsive that i feel that i have to finish every book i start. it's the most poorly written, sexist, ethnocentric, cliche ridden, fake thing i can remember reading.

this makes me so mad it's making me sarcastic. i hate quentin. he's not as smart as he thinks he is. everything is spelled out and repeated, the constant attitude :look at me!!!look at me! i'm so clever, do you see what i'm doing here? i'm talking about the story as i tell it!? oh, i am so brilliant. did you notice i just made a reference to all these fantasy novels you read and several cool bands, and now i'm making a reference to the storytelling process itself, oh, i am so cool and so smart woo! ...

stop telling me that he is the smartest of the smart! i dislike when people keep telling me something that isn't true. he lacks common sense, insight, logic, and the ability to think critically. he's heartless and unkind. he is also the the most entitled, privileged,nothing to say except he is bored. bored? really? and then it's like here's this alternate world and quentin and his friends go in because they are bored and want an adventure which is to save these people...and they can't save themselves because they are too stupid because they need american children to save them. really? because what world could possibly make things right without americans, right?

reading this makes me hate reading. now that's a special kind of talent, isn't it?

the one good thing: reading this has made me reflect on how in the last year or so, in my search for comfort reading combined with my wish to wait to read the really good books when i am done with the [ ](which is still 6 months away) i have let myself stop looking for the kind of books that really move me. (not completely, but a lot.) so, i am inspired to stop waiting. thank you for that!(less)

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Mar 04, 2013 Nataliya rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2013-reads

'You can't just decide to be happy.'
'No, you can't. But you can sure as hell decide to be miserable. Is that what you want?'

The answer to this, as far as Quentin Coldwater is concerned, is a resounding 'YES!' At any stage of his life. He makes Holden Caulfield look like a bundle of sunshine. He makes Charlie Brown resemble an embodiment of optimism and positivity. Eeyore the Donkey is brimming with life force compared to our perpetually unhappy hero.

'...You couldn't have everything. Or at leas

...more

'You can't just decide to be happy.'
'No, you can't. But you can sure as hell decide to be miserable. Is that what you want?'

The answer to this, as far as Quentin Coldwater is concerned, is a resounding 'YES!' At any stage of his life. He makes Holden Caulfield look like a bundle of sunshine. He makes Charlie Brown resemble an embodiment of optimism and positivity. Eeyore the Donkey is brimming with life force compared to our perpetually unhappy hero.

'...You couldn't have everything. Or at least the available evidence pointed overwhelmingly to that conclusion.'

...

Not only will he always think of a cup as being half-empty, but he will drive himself crazy wondering who the hell drank half of it to make it so. Hand him his deepest dream on a silver platter - and five minutes later he will be whining in a decidedly disillusioned fashion about how it fails to make him happy. Disillusionment and dissatisfaction are how he operates.

If ennui were to be a superpower, Quentin Coldwater would have been Superman, propelled into space by the power of his constant negativity.

...

'All of it just confirmed his belief that his real life, the life he should be living, had been mislaid through some clerical error by the cosmic bureaucracy. This couldn't be it. It had been diverted somewhere else, to somebody else, and he'd been issued this shitty substitute faux life instead.'

In 'The Magicians' Lev Grossman goes against the popular device of literature - the allure of wish fulfillment, the deep-rooted belief that once you find that secret place in life where you belong things will magically be alright and you will be happy. (*)

(*) Granted, he goes against the literary mainstream while at the same time using the obviously commercially successful formula of a young protagonist with a newly found magical ability who suddenly finds himself in an equivalent of a British boarding school (well, in this case, a college. In Upstate New York. But it's still a British boarding school, really). (view spoiler)

So it seems that Grossman tries to get out of mainstream while firmly staying in the commercially successful mainstream. Mmmmm-kay.

Anyhow, unlike what we are supposed to expect, Quentin, miserable and disillusioned in the quasi-grown-up way that quite a few teens seem to be, does not find happiness in his unexpected admission to Brakebills, a magical college. Apparently he learns that - suprise! - you cannot just be handed happiness, that you actually need to put some effort into it, and that you can easily poison anything, even a fairy-tale, if you approach anything from the vantage point of pseudo-sophisticated negativity.

'Every ambition he'd ever had in his life had been realized the day he was admitted to Brakebills, and he was struggling to formulate a new one with any kind of practical specificity.'

Actually, the aura of overly disillusioned ennui-infused pseudo-sophistication in the faux-adult way (the way that tends to overstate almost explicitly that it's SO NOT Harry Potter and the like) permeates this entire book, getting in the way of pacing, character development and ultimately many readers' enjoyment.

As Quentin mechanically stumbles through his four years of quasi-British education in the self-pitying perpetually drunken haze, the plot stammers all over the place, never picking up a consistent pace, never leading to the reader actually caring about what happens to this set of miserable characters. So many situations are introduced and incompletely dealt with, without much consequence and/or resolution. So many potentially interesting storylines are never pursued further, with Grossman choosing to focus on the less exciting parts of this story. And a belated infusion of plot about three quarters into the book, after a long and befuzzling journey through Quentin's magical education, comes way overdue and at this point fails to impress and, frankly, begins to irritate.

All this while Quentin, despite his apparently staggering intellect, acts like a frustratingly clueless idiot and makes you want to reach into the book and shake some sense into him. And all of this just to see him come to even greater depths of self-pity and annoying in their platitude 'revelations':

'He wasn't in a safe little story where wrongs were automatically righted; he was still in the real world, where bad bitter things happened for no reason, and people paid for things that weren't their fault.'

And with this deep realization, Quentin gets this timeless piece of advice that summarizes the entire point of this story in addition to the message that things tend to suck quite badly (insert sarcasm here if you'd like):

'You found out, didn't you? There's no getting away from yourself. Not even in Fillory.'

Hey, I do not mind reading about the characters who are childish and stupid and very self-centered. What I expect is that in a series of events (a.k.a. plot) they will actually grow and change and learn something - something to make me feel that it was worth reading the book for. Even Holden Caulfield seems to change and grow up a bit, despite his uber-teenageness.

Quentin and his friends, on the other hand, do not appear to grow up in any way; they are contentedly stuck in the perpetual aimlessness and inflated self-pity, all while flaunting their oh-so-special disullusionment which reminds me of pointless drunk 'adult' college conversations that lead nowhere - and I'm left a bit annoyed and irritated by it all.

Anyway, 2.5 stars. Not a horrible book, but not that good either. Just kinda 'meh', honestly. It left me not really caring about what happened or what will happen next - and that's not really a good sign. Quentin can brood himself into oblivion - I don't care much.

'For just one second, look at your life and see how perfect it is. Stop looking for the next secret door that is going to lead you to your real life. Stop waiting. This is it: there's nothing else. It's here, and you'd better decide to enjoy it or you're going to be miserable wherever you go, for the rest of your life, forever.'

(less)

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Feb 25, 2013 Ian rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: urban-fantasy, philosophy, magic, fantasy, dark-fantasy

A friend gave this book to me as a Christmas present, but the sneering reviews (on and inside the book) which compared it (oh-so-favorably) to Harry Potter/Narnia/LotR (proclaiming them "weak" and this strong and bracing and refreshing and...) kept repulsing me before I could even get to the first page. She's coming to visit me next month however and I'm determined to read it! Updates to follow!

UPDATE 4: A miserable book about miserable people being miserable while doing miserable things written...more A friend gave this book to me as a Christmas present, but the sneering reviews (on and inside the book) which compared it (oh-so-favorably) to Harry Potter/Narnia/LotR (proclaiming them "weak" and this strong and bracing and refreshing and...) kept repulsing me before I could even get to the first page. She's coming to visit me next month however and I'm determined to read it! Updates to follow!

UPDATE 4: A miserable book about miserable people being miserable while doing miserable things written by, I suspect, a very miserable man. I was also disappointed, but amused, to learn how much of the novel (especially the identity of the "big bad" and the fate of an oft-mentioned ancillary character) I was able to predict ahead of time, and the dialogue in the final great confrontation felt absurdly hackneyed -- especially coming from an author desperately trying to establish a narrative and style contrary to the genre he's trying to satirize/criticize/mock. You know whose story would have been far more interesting and engaging and subversive? MARTIN CHATWIN. You know whose story was a tiresome exercise in sneering banality? QUENTIN COLDWATER.

UPDATE 3: This is a quick, easy read -- i think that has a lot to do with Grossman's "tell-don't-show" approach to writing, and the psuedo-serialized format. The characters are pretty flat, just broad generalizations (fat guy, uptight girl, mopey protagonist, smart love-interest, mohawk guy, Russian teacher, hot young teacher, etc.) and the dialog actually feels LESS realistic and MORE awkward for all the modern-day slang and profanity that's shoehorned in. The sex scenes are vague descriptions, and for that I have to admire Grossman's restraint -- after all, he's trying very hard to write for "adults".

UPDATE 2: I think I've finally realized what this actually reminds me of. It's like a pale imitation of the graphic novel mini-series The Books of Magic by Neil Gaiman (and its subsequent, lesser follow-up serieses "The Books of Magic", "The Names of Magic" and "The Age of Magic".) It seems to draw a lot from "The Books of Magic" actually, complete with an immature (emotionally, psychologically, intellectually and physically) wizard slowly using his power to indulge his every base instinct and whim and losing touch with humanity. Sadly, there's no great sense of loss here, only a slow realization that the protagonist is as tiresome at the end as he was at the beginning.

UPDATE 1: I found this line from a GoodReads review of the book and it seems to sum up what I'm feeling and what most non-hipsters felt about it: "This is a cold and sterile book for people who think themselves too sophisticated for genre fiction, a sub-section of the reading public that, I suspect, includes the author." Grossman is a "teller" not a "shower" and as a result he's really not much of a writer. The only parts I've actually found compelling have been the brief descriptions of the natural world in Upstate New York, and that's only because I grew up there and remember the place quite clearly; I am substituting my memories for the artistry Grossman lacks. So far every character has been unpleasant and unsympathetic, no-one is really happy or even capable of feeling content, and magic is empty and apparently incapable of anything truly special. How very much like every "profound" novel written these days! Maybe this will appeal more to fans of Jonathan Franzen and Michael Chabon? It will certainly appeal to those readers who mistake misery and depression and nihilism for depth and insight and realism. Is the message that magic cannot make you happy, because it is merely a tool and as such simply reflects the inner character of the user? That could have been conveyed without hitting the reader quite so hard over the head with how utterly miserable everyone and everything is. Part of the problem with "The Magicians" is that the author clearly sees the subject matter as far beneath him, like the "Fillory" books which Quentin loves but others dismiss as childish and through which Grossman conveys his utter contempt for Lewis, Tolkien, Rowling, etc. and their fans; it is as though Grossman and his hipster readers are outside looking in and sharing smirking, adolescent jibes directed at the people having genuine fun inside. After all, they're too COOL to join the party. I hope things improve, but it's not much hope.(less)

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Dec 12, 2011 Mike (the Paladin) rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: fantasy, urban-fantasy

I have a Goordreads friend who likes this book. He expressed a thought that I might not. While not wholly correct about my take he came pretty close.:

Well, first Stephen, you're right in a way, I don't like stories that are "downers just to be downers". The nihilistic attitude you see so often. I don't like the (as I've said before) "life is crap and then you die" story. So many today seem to think that for a story to have any depth it has to be deeply depressing.

On the other hand if there is a...more

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Aug 02, 2011 Kemper rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: fantasy, magic, 2011-r

A quick and easy way to describe this would be to call it Harry Potter for adults. There's a magic school and a lot more sex and booze than poor old Harry ever had. But that doesn't do it justice because this was an extremely original and unique twist on the notion of what it would be like to actually live in a world where magic and fantasy realms exist.

Quentin Coldwater is a bored teenager getting ready to apply for college but is already seriously disillusioned with his life and wishes things...more A quick and easy way to describe this would be to call it Harry Potter for adults. There's a magic school and a lot more sex and booze than poor old Harry ever had. But that doesn't do it justice because this was an extremely original and unique twist on the notion of what it would be like to actually live in a world where magic and fantasy realms exist.

Quentin Coldwater is a bored teenager getting ready to apply for college but is already seriously disillusioned with his life and wishes things were more like his favorite fantasy novels set in a land called Fillory, which is essentially the author's stand-in for Narnia. However, Quentin quickly learns that he's got magical talent, and he's suddenly attending a training academy called Brakebills.

Quentin is the kind of guy who after finding out he won a huge lottery would instantly start bitching about how bad the taxes will be. Even though he's always longed for a world closer to his Filory novels, he never sees the adventure he's living by learning magic and all the things that go into his training. Learning magic and even falling in love don't make him happy, and he holds onto the childish idea that there's some 'next place' that will finally make him complete.

To make matters worse, once he and his friends graduate, they learn that there's no real need for magic since there are no big magical threats so they use their talents to live fat and easy while partying too much and trying to entertain themselves. Until an old classmate appears with the news that Filory is real.

There's three big things at work in this book. The idea that magic is real, and the author put a great deal of effort into developing the idea of magic in the real world with specific rules. The second is that the idea of journeying to a magical land on some kind of quest would be a fun adventure is actually pretty naive when you consider how actually bloody and insane the kind of things described would be. (Think about what it would REALLY be like to have some kind of half-human/half-beast run at you with a sword.) The third (and most interesting) is that a young man with a world of possibilities in front of him would find himself disappointed with life because it isn't like an adventure story and his stubborn refusal to realize that life will never be like a fantasy novel even if he eventually makes it to an actual fantasy world.

Fast-paced, funny, sometimes tragic and always entertaining, this was a book that I really enjoyed for it's offbeat way of looking at magic and fantasy stories.(less)

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Feb 08, 2011 Dan Schwent rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: fantasy, plan-on-rereading-one-day, favorites

Quentin Coldwater is an unhappy teen, eyeing up an uncertain future in college. He's secretly in love with his friend Julia. Nothing else really matters to him except the Fillory and Further series of books he's loved since childhood. Imagine how he feels when a seamingly routine college interview drops an undiscovered Fillory book in his grasp and leads him to Brakebills, a college of wizardry, and worlds beyond...

First of all, this isn't Harry Potter for adults, no matter how much people want...more

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Jan 30, 2013 Kevin Xu rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: re-read

I feel like this book has too many tropes and cliche of all the mainstream fantasy books all wrapped up in one. I hope maybe the sequel will be better. Overall, the book was not worth the time to read it. First, the author comes from this high New York mind set that only New Yorkers are better than others, even better, add both Harvard and Yale into the mix. (one of the reason the New York Times and the media love this book) To me what I hate most about this book is that he had to copy from Harr...more

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Oct 07, 2011 Simeon rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: utter-shite, fantasy

The story of a quasi-sociopathic high school cretin who mouth-breathes his way into an exclusive fantasy club of anhedonic wizards - replete with bad writing and worse story-telling.

Enjoy.

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Apr 22, 2010 mark monday rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: time-to-come-of-age, fantastickal, secret-histories

it is clear that the author is trying for Harry Potter through the lens of Bret Easton Ellis. nice try! but all the carefully placed bits of minor note ennui and teenage boredom cannot hide the fact that the author actually has a lot invested in writing pure, thrilling fantasy with a healthy dose of phantasmagoria. i will take the moments of awe over the moments of bored disdain any day... and i think the author secretly agrees. Grossman's description of a transformative flight (heh), the Beast'...more

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Feb 19, 2010 Ben Babcock rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2010-read, fantasy, owned

If you write enough book reviews, eventually you start sounding like everyone you never wanted to be. Today, I'll be the annoying guy who brags about how he saw everything coming. That's right, I found this book utterly predictable from start to finish. Even the Arctic fox sex scene.

The Magicians is a very postmodern type of fantasy, deconstructing as it does the Narnian-style childhood fantasy of saving the world. It's one of those curiously self-aware books that nevertheless stays firmly on th...more

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Jun 25, 2011 Stefan rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: fantasy, library-loan, www-fantasyliterature-com-review, far-beyond-reality-review

The Magicians by Lev Grossman is one of the most frequently reviewed fantasy novels of the last few years, which isn’t surprising because the author is a well known writer (and book reviewer) for TIME Magazine, and the book was very effectively hyped as “Harry Potter with college age students.” The end result of all of this is that lots of people who don’t regularly read fantasy have picked up this novel, and many of them had their expectations severely challenged. So, is The Magicians also wort...more

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Nov 09, 2009 Kasia rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: high-fantasy, lovely-covers

I was ready to love this book, it's supposed to be Harry Potter like but more gritty, more realistic, more substantial, and I guess it is and I still like the idea of it. And yet this book did not work for me. I was really patient with it, I downplayed the initial irritation of incorporating the entire Potter premise. It's one thing to borrow bits and pieces, it's another to rip off a whole concept leaving out a few bits here and there and dressing up the rest. But since I'm a sucker for fantasy...more

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Jun 16, 2011 Chris rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

What a strange little book. Not sure what else to call it, unless it would be a blending of Harry Potter and Narnia with adult content and a heavy dash of the bleak yet often humorous mind-set of a Chuck Palahniuk novel.

And yet, I very much enjoyed it. It wasn't epic, nor heroic. It didn't really have a constructive social message. It wasn't very positive at all. But I still liked it quite a bit.

What does that say about me? Am I negative, with little hope of finding happiness (or even contentmen...more

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Feb 26, 2010 D. Pow rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: fantasy-sf-horror

This book has been hard-pedaled as an adult Harry Potter and it is-but with a soulless little git like Draco Malfoy as the main protagonist. Grossman doesn't get to the genuine transformative joy possible in books about other worlds and magic, the metaphorical kick one can bring to the reader. This is a cold and sterile book for people who think themselves too sophisticated for genre fiction, a sub-section of the reading public that, I suspect, includes the author.

To be fair there are certain th...more This book has been hard-pedaled as an adult Harry Potter and it is-but with a soulless little git like Draco Malfoy as the main protagonist. Grossman doesn't get to the genuine transformative joy possible in books about other worlds and magic, the metaphorical kick one can bring to the reader. This is a cold and sterile book for people who think themselves too sophisticated for genre fiction, a sub-section of the reading public that, I suspect, includes the author.

To be fair there are certain things Grossman does well. There are isolated set-pieces of violence and magical ritual gone wrong, that are thrilling, scary and visceral. He also is very clever at conveying the huge rush of empowerment a disenfranchised teen would feel when uncovering then honing magical powers. The old riff of a nobody becoming somebody is done well here, even though it’s crouched in dry, clinical and mechanistic terms that undermine its effectiveness.

And that’s the rub here. For every scene of terror and beauty, there are two that are clumsy and lame. Grossman presents certain key plot elements so obtusely that they hit like a feather instead of a hammer. He condenses action at the wrong times, has pivotal stuff occur off-stage as it were and just doesn’t deliver from page to page either on the commercial fiction scale or one grander.

Traditional Fantasy Novels power(as well as their stodgy childishness) lie to a degree in their pedagogical function. They are to an extent primers for young people on how to behave, how to become a more effective human being, how to be brave in the face of adversity and to learn to be selfless on occasion even though ones adolescent genes(and jeans) are screaming for pure selfish, solipsistic, I am the center of the universe, expression.

So there is a journey up Mount Doom by sad, wounded Frodo and stout, brave Sam. And Harry Potter puts his nuts on the line over and over against that nose-less wonder, Voldemort, secure in the knowledge that Ron and Hermione always have his back. They are, in the course of their journeys, becoming braver and stronger and less rooted in their myopic view of things. In Grossman’s novel, the protagonist starts out as a selfish turd, segue ways to more selfish turdism, and then does a sideways double back flip into being (you guessed it) a selfish turd. This is refreshing to an extent-how like real life it is-people seldom change unless confronted by trauma or some extreme events. But in Grossman’s hands it is just one more nail in the coffin, taking an eminently worthwhile premise(adult Harry Potter, twisted Narnia) and magically transforming it through bad craft into utter shit.
(less)

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Apr 18, 2009 Mike rated it 4 of 5 stars

The logline zipping about for this novel almost convinced me to give it a pass, despite having enjoyed Grossman's last novel: Harry Potter leaves me cold; I'm seemingly the only person in the world who liked (the underrated) The Little Friend a whole lot more than (the overrated) The Secret History; the Narnia books--the three I read, resentfully--were forced on me by parents who thought they would appeal to me in a manner more wholesome than the horror fiction consumed by (or consuming) me star...more The logline zipping about for this novel almost convinced me to give it a pass, despite having enjoyed Grossman's last novel: Harry Potter leaves me cold; I'm seemingly the only person in the world who liked (the underrated) The Little Friend a whole lot more than (the overrated) The Secret History; the Narnia books--the three I read, resentfully--were forced on me by parents who thought they would appeal to me in a manner more wholesome than the horror fiction consumed by (or consuming) me starting in grade 4, and there's nothing I liked less than escapism meant to be good for me. And that touchstone Tolkien? Meh. Fantasy's just generally not my bag of fantasy; creatures, crimes, heists, aliens, even the most ludicrous of space operas, sure, ... but orcs and swords and spells and magic, all that thirteen-sided die stuff, will usually bore when not actively aggravating me.

But The Magicians was line by line clear then lush then sly and always engaging, chapter by chapter engrossing, and ultimately a very good read, even for the magic-resistant, and despite a few tics and tacks that rankled here and there.

There was one sequence that knocked my socks off. I won't give much away, for fear of spoilers, but it channeled the most chilling possibilities hinted at by Lovecraft, and captured what throughout the novel worked best for me: magic (and fantasy more broadly) as an alien, inscrutable force, not just some pallid escapist complement to our real-world desires but that deep unconscious confusing Other stuff which pushes up and surprises, unsettles, confuses our sense of the world and our place in it. At its best, and the chapter on "The Beast" is pretty damn wonderful, the novel made me understand the allure of Fantasy. It made me want to read the way our protagonist Quentin reads the Narnia-inflected Fillory novels, the way Grossman must read his favorites.

And the book was never less than good.

Even with those aforementioned tics. I can find novels about youth on that road to disillusionment--even when the plot's more concerned with incantations than intoxication ('though this novel has a fair bit of both)--a wee bit dull. If I'm gonna read about self-obsessed men (who are more like boys), I'd rather they were even more outrageously awful--more John-Selfish, fewer epiphanies, no hint of redemption. (I like my bad behavior neat, no chaser.) The magical element maybe didn't sidetrack me enough from the somewhat too-familiar misspent-youth plot, nor vice versa. But, again, I'm pretty much the exact opposite of the person who might be very inclined to pick this up--and I *still* really dug it. So I'm betting the countless, respective and/or collective Potter Tartt Lewis fans will do handsprings about the novel, and deservedly so. Good stuff.(less)

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Sep 30, 2009 Sarah rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: alex-award

I had such high hopes for this "next Harry Potter" novel and was singing its praises early on in my reading. The first half of the novel is very much like an adult Harry Potter book. Quentin is applying for colleges and doesn't know what he wants out of life. Then he gets a magical invitation to take a difficult test in a room full of smart kids. He makes it and sets off to Brakebills College. There he learns magic, meets friends, and realizes that he still isn't a very happy person. Like many t...more

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Feb 02, 2012 Ala rated it 2 of 5 stars

I'm not going to get all in-depth in this review. There's no point when others have said it better.

I'll just say that, aside from an interesting school and faculty, and a couple of good characters(Alice and Josh), this book sucked. It was full of emo, whiny, douchebag, firstworldproblems teenagers.

And I'll also say that Quentin is quite possibly the most annoying character ever. Seriously, dude:

You've got fucking magic. Stop being a bitch and enjoy it, ya bastard.

Ugh.

Two whiny-ass stars.

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Apr 08, 2012 David Katzman rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Anyone. Anyone. Anyone

This book was just amazing. I loved every sentence of it. Was it perfect? No, not absolutely perfect. A few trivial elements bothered me but none of them were significant enough to detract from the beauty of the writing, the sophistication of the story, and the convincing world built by Lev Grossman.*

For the uninitiated, the premise of this book is nothing new in fantasy. A young man in our real world/reality discovers magic is real when he is tracked down and invited to attend a magic universit...more

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Mar 19, 2011 Stephen rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: ebooks, audiobook, darker-than-you-think, fantasy, magic-schools, dark-and-gritty, magical-realism

5.0 stars. I ABSOLUTELY LOVED THIS BOOK!!!! I know that not everyone agrees with this sentiment for this book, but I was greatly impressed by it. From the very beginning of this story, I got the distinct feeling that Grossman was going to be taking "the less travelled path" in his fantasy novel. While I have seen a lot of comparisons to other stories (some of which are quite intentional by the author) this book is certainly ITS OWN BOOK.

The novel is really two very different and distinct storie...more 5.0 stars. I ABSOLUTELY LOVED THIS BOOK!!!! I know that not everyone agrees with this sentiment for this book, but I was greatly impressed by it. From the very beginning of this story, I got the distinct feeling that Grossman was going to be taking "the less travelled path" in his fantasy novel. While I have seen a lot of comparisons to other stories (some of which are quite intentional by the author) this book is certainly ITS OWN BOOK.

The novel is really two very different and distinct stories that I thought worked together very well. The first half to two-thirds of the book is the story of Quentin Coldwater, a brilliant, angst-ridden, self-involved high school senior. Or, put another way, a pretty normal teenager that happens to be intellectually gifted. While Quentin is on his way to be interviewed for acceptance at Princeton, he is (through a series of circumstances I won't spoil) given the opportunity to enroll in a secret university that teaches magic. You can tell from that description how the Harry Potter comparisons come up. However, this "magic" school and the students that attend there are portrayed (quite effectively in my opinion) as the kind of personalities you would expect to find at a college campus for gifted teenagers. Common threads running through the group based on some shared intellectual capabilities, but otherwise a very eclectic group from a variety of backgrounds and all dealing with their own very real issues. In addition, the teaching of magic is shown to be a extremely difficult and an often tedious endeavor. I thought this aspect of the book was superbly done and made for compelling reading.

One other interesting (to me at least) aspect of Quentin that I think bears mentioning is that he is a HUGE FANTASY FANBOY and so the discovery that magic is real makes him believe that all of his dreams are going to come true and that he is going to be able to live out the dream of being a part of a real life fantasy adventure. I can imagine their are a number of us that could relate to that. However, reality, even one with magic, is never as easy or as fun as Quentin's books make them out and so he finds himself disappointed and disillusioned a lot. In fact, his extensive knowledge of other fantasy worlds actually makes the disappointment more acute.

Frankly, I don't see how it could be any other way and that this relationship to fiction and reality is one of the central themes that Grossman was exploring in this novel. Thus, I found one of the book's central messages to be that part of growing up is reconciling your childhood dreams with the realities of everyday life, AND STILL FINDING A WAY TO BE HAPPY!!! Some people found this to be a sad or depressing message, but I didn't find it that way at all. I think we all see the world differently now then we did when we were kids and that doesn't mean we are less happy.

Anyway, Quentin's favorite fantasy series is about a land called Fillory which very intentionally resembles Narnia complete with siblings going through furniture to a strange land ruled by giant, god-like animals (a Ram named Ember rather than a lion named Aslan). This is important because Fillory plays a central role in the last part of the novel which I will not go into so as to avoid spoilers. I will just say that the last third of the novel becomes a fairly typical fantasy adventure in structure, but whose execution is in keeping with the tone and style of the rest of the story. In other words, Fillory is NOT YOUR PARENTS NARNIA. As with the first two thirds of the book, I found this to be well written and compelling.

Overall, I can not recommend this book highly enough. I thought the writing was superb, the characters were three dimensional and very well developed and the world-building was amazing, especially in regards to how the fantastic was made to seem so real. HIGHEST POSSIBLE RECOMMENDATION!!!(less)

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Sep 03, 2009 Cindy rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: fantasy

Okay I am in the minority I didn't really like this book. I didn't think it was going to be a Harry Potter, as a matter of fact I knew it wouldn't be even though it was compared to HP.... the author even compared it to HP which its not.

I can enjoy that this is a "tribute" to fantasy..... but that's about it. It was a depressing poorly written book. Details seemed to be lacking and the only details we'd get is a knock off version of another fantasy book. The characters were one sided and had no...more

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Jan 21, 2013 Jordan Gregory rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Damn. Where to begin?
This book blew me away, despite my reservations.
A secret school for adolescent magicians? SOUNDS FAMILIAR.
A (supposedly) fictional storybookland accessed by children, and full of witches, talking animals, and moralizing overtones? SOUNDS FAMILIAR.
I was worried this book would only be a mashup of my childhood faves. In a way, it is. But it's also so much more than that.

Quentin Coldwater is in the throes of the admissions process for Princeton. However, Quentin's life take...more Damn. Where to begin?
This book blew me away, despite my reservations.
A secret school for adolescent magicians? SOUNDS FAMILIAR.
A (supposedly) fictional storybookland accessed by children, and full of witches, talking animals, and moralizing overtones? SOUNDS FAMILIAR.
I was worried this book would only be a mashup of my childhood faves. In a way, it is. But it's also so much more than that.

Quentin Coldwater is in the throes of the admissions process for Princeton. However, Quentin's life takes a drastic new direction when his interviewer dies, and instead Quentin finds a parcel with his name on it that takes him to Brakebills, a private upstate school for magicians. And so the first half of the book chronicles Quentin's introduction to the world of magic, and the countless (mis)adventures he has with his friends (and more-than-friends).

Initially, this felt just like Hogwarts, only with solely cynical brainiacs for its student body; it felt like Ravenclaw and Slytherin had an American bastard child. Quentin is our resident HP, foisted upon a magical world from a less-than-stellar family life. Only this is not Harry Potter. The characters are all more well-rounded, sarcasic, and wry. Quentin loathes his family, but only because they are so thoroughly average, and not because they're abusive, spiteful fatties. In a sense, I'm reading the same IDEA as Harry Potter, but for a more astute audience. The emotions are different, the magic is more complicated, and the darker parts are thoroughly creepy. Right and wrong aren't quite as black and white as Rowling (beautifully) led us to believe as children, and these characters struggle with that.

After leaving Brakebills, Quentin and his friends eventually discover that Fillory, the magical land central to a beloved childhood series featuring the semi-orphaned Chatwin children, is real. Through a loophole described in the last book, they are able to access Fillory using the enchanted buttons of a merry band of bunny-sailors. But, Fillory is not as cheerful and simplistic as the kids' books suggest, and it certainly ain't Narnia; it's a nation at war. Right and wrong are multifaceted and difficult to discern. Ember and Umber, Fillory's Aslan-goat duo, are just as nonchalant in their ruling, but Quentin's gang takes a more active role in questioning their indifference. Evil arises from a source (which I cannot describe in more detail because it would be teh biggest spoiler EVAR) that has very good reasons for its actions, as well as to fill a void left by Ember and Umber's unfeeling leadership. In short, it got dark. Like, Voldemort-and-Snape-backstory dark (but still NOT a Harry Potter knockoff, I promise). The inspiration for Fillory is transparently Narnia, but Grossman surprised and enchanted me enough to have me clambering to read the next installment.

He's also got me dying to reread HP and Narnia, so I think I'll get on that ASAP.(less)

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Aug 19, 2010 Seth Hahne rated it 4 of 5 stars

People love describing one thing as the adult version of another thing. For example, Foucault's Pendulum is like The Da Vinci Code for adults. The allure of this kind of comparison is at least threefold: 1) it offers a simple way to draw people in, by playing on their affection for another work; 2) it leverages against the desire to take in a more mature version of something they already like; and 3) it derides the value of the other, presumably-enjoyed work.

People love to dismiss especially po...more

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Nov 19, 2012 Nessa rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, review, not-my-cup-of-earl-grey-tea

The only things I knew about The Magicians before I read it was...

1) It was good.
2) It was basically Harry Potter, but the characters went to a university (Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy) rather than a secondary institution (Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry).

Pleasantly, I discovered many more things about The Magicians as I read it in my spare time.

1) Its main character (especially later in the book) takes Harry Potter at his most angsty and quintuples it.
2) Magic is really, r...more

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Mar 15, 2012 Jeffrey Keeten rated it 5 of 5 stars

I passed on reading this book when it first came out because I was underwhelmed by the author's first book Codex. The excessively negative reviews about The Magicians peaked my interest. The complaints these reviewers had actually made me want to read the book. The positive reviews confirmed my growing suspicion that I should read this book. Although I am late to the party I must say I am glad that I overcame my initial reluctance because I loved this book.

Unfortunately this book was marketed a...more I passed on reading this book when it first came out because I was underwhelmed by the author's first book Codex. The excessively negative reviews about The Magicians peaked my interest. The complaints these reviewers had actually made me want to read the book. The positive reviews confirmed my growing suspicion that I should read this book. Although I am late to the party I must say I am glad that I overcame my initial reluctance because I loved this book.

Unfortunately this book was marketed as an adult book for Harry Potter fans. There is some truth in this marketing scheme, but too many people who are ardent Harry Potter fans are not the proper readership for this book. One reviewer said how much he despised this book, but that the "hipsters" would like it. What! Wait! does that mean I'm a hipster reader. I'm finally... cool. I probably just lost my hipster status using the word cool.

I was afraid that this would be a year one, year two, etc. magical school book series. Not so. Grossman smokes through 5 years of Brakebills in quick order giving us highlights, but leaving a lean script that keeps the pages turning.

One of my favorite scenes is when the main character Quentin Coldwater and his friends are turning into geese to fly to Brakebills South in Antarctica. "Days, weeks, maybe months and years passed. Who knew or cared? Quentin had never experienced peace and satisfaction like this. He forgot about his human past, about Brakebills or Brooklyn. Why hang on to them? He had no name anymore. He barely had any individual identity, and he didn't want one. What good were such human artifacts? He was an animal. His job was to turn bugs and plants into muscle and fat and feathers and flight and miles logged. He served only his flock-fellows and the wind and the laws of Darwin. And he served whatever force sent him gliding along the invisible magnetic rails, always southward, down the rough, stony coast of Peru, spiny Andes on his port, the sprawling blue Pacific on his starboard. He had never been happier." I actually found myself really thinking about what it would be like to be a goose.

Professor Mayakovsky the teacher at Brakebills South really turns boys and girls into men and women. It is the boot camp of magic. Mayakovsky sums it up to Quentin on his first day. "You need to do more than memorize, Quentin. You must learn the principles of magic with more than your head. You must learn them with your bones, with your blood, your liver, your heart, your deek. He grabbed his crotch through his dressing gown and gave it a shake." Long before the reader gets to this point they will be well aware that they are not hanging out in Hogwarts, but I think this sentence illustrates the difference in approach that Grossman takes with Brakebills.

Grossman doesn't shy away from Harry Potter. He actually makes a couple of references to the Hogwarts series. They are books in the evolving reality of the world he creates for this book. Our heroes, be they too human, moments of bravery wrapped around acts of cowardice finally arrive in Fillory. I was least interest in this portion of the book which makes me wonder if I will like the follow up book The Magician King. I've underestimated Grossman before so at some point I will give it a try.

Most of the time I didn't even realize that I was reading a fantasy book. The characters reminded me of people that I went to college with. Grossman actually does a good job developing the characters. They are all interesting, flawed, very human characters that again made me believe in the reality of this world. I suppose because there is sex and copious alcohol consumption, although not flagrantly so, reviewers have made comparisons to Bret Easton Ellis. I will say all of the sex was in the context of the plot and even sometimes gave the plot a proper nudge. I have also seen comparisons to Donna Tartt and to me that is a closer comparison because the characters had more personality than what I experienced in Less than Zero.

If you are looking for Harry Potter even an adult Harry Potter you should probably give this book a pass. If you are looking for just a damn good edgy book with well developed characters and a compelling plot than pick up a copy and start reading. Before you know it you will have consumed 100 pages and will be stealing time from the rest of your life to finish the remaining pages. (less)

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Apr 11, 2012 Leslie rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2012-tbr-reduction, sword-and-laser

UGH!

My vocabulary improved while reading this book. Mostly I was working on synonyms for the feelings I had while reading.

Ennui was probably my favorite.

I'm sorry, I just didn't even like it at all. Book 4 was alright. But everything else was just meh.

Quentin, despite being described as super-smart (something I could not see by the way) seems consumed by boredom and apathy. I just kept thinking..."I hate you all" at all the characters.

I loved the idea of this book. It really does draw on Harr...more

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Apr 05, 2011 Lauren rated it 5 of 5 stars

Harry Potter for adults! You had me at...well, every single word in that description. Loving the conception of magic.

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Aug 08, 2010 Jason (FNORDinc) rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: reviewed, reviewed-on-fnordinc

“BURN THIS” wrote Lev Grossman on the inside cover of my book. Lev was surprised to see a copy of his first novel ‘WARP’ showing up a book reading for ‘The Magicians’. He stated that most of the remaining copies are being used to hold up his broken couch at home. A humorous idea and I wonder how many new authors end up with excess copies of their first printings lying about.

Unfortunately, I think I threw him off his game a bit, and feeling bad, I did not stick around to ask him any questions. In...more “BURN THIS” wrote Lev Grossman on the inside cover of my book. Lev was surprised to see a copy of his first novel ‘WARP’ showing up a book reading for ‘The Magicians’. He stated that most of the remaining copies are being used to hold up his broken couch at home. A humorous idea and I wonder how many new authors end up with excess copies of their first printings lying about.

Unfortunately, I think I threw him off his game a bit, and feeling bad, I did not stick around to ask him any questions. Instead, I will ask them psychically, or maybe via email :)

‘The Magicians’ will not end up holding a couch off the hardwood floor of his living room. It was a phenomenal book.

In Magicians, magic exists. Schools for magic exist. Students go to these schools and learn a very large amount of very dull information. There is no evil villain ala Rowlings/HP universe.. Only a life assisted by magic, or a life in a cubicle with the rest of us non-magic schmucks.

Quentin Coldwater lives in one fo the boroughs of NYC. He is a geek, top of his class, not used to brilliance that outshines his own. He is no virgin, but likely this could be due to technicalities. Quentin is focusing on getting into an Ivy League college… Little else matters, including the fact that he has absolutely no idea what to do with his life. He is very easy to relate to, angsty, but relate-able.

This novel is perfect for anyone who loved reading CS Lewis as a child. It is perfect for those who wish HP and friends would grow a backbone and drop an F-bomb when they get angry or forget some homework. Drinking, drugs, praying to the porcelain god, sex, mind numbing classrooms, confused normal humans, even a throwback scene near the end that reminded me of the ridiculousness of the movie ‘The Craft’ (floating windblown witches)… This book has just about everything in it.

It shares just a bit of the same essence as Peter Jackson’s ‘Meet the Feebles’ had for muppets. Just a bit…

The Magicians touches quite boldly on the pulse of the magic community. People may be able to snap their fingers and light a cigarette from a finger tip flame, or accidentally call a black hole into existence, but in the end, self-esteem cannot be given to a person. Though I have to admit a bit of money, success, sex and a lot of luck could set someones self esteem in a spot where growth will be hands off to a certain degree. Ultimately though, it has to come from with in.

-- FNORDinc.com
http://www.fnordinc.com/2010/08-07/re...(less)

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Jun 01, 2011 Dawn rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fantasy, read-in-2010, own-read, read-in-2011

I don't know what I can say about this one that hasn't already been said. Yes, it's true, it is sort of a mash up of Harry Potter and Narnia. But it's so much more than that as well. I really liked this book, though I can't really explain why. It kept me interested the whole time through, which not many books do. It was fun and a little dark as well, and it made me laugh quite often. I had no idea that this was a series, and there was another book coming out next year, until I flipped to the las...more

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Aug 19, 2009 miaaa rated it 3 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Dahlia Naga, Echa Russell

Recommended to miaaa by: Windy Ariestanty

Shelves: fairy-haven

There's only two options dealing with life and it's problem. You stay and fought your way or you run and hide to a fantasy land. Quentin, or Q as his friends address him, never satisfied with his life. It lacks of something and when he was accepted at Brakehills he thinks this is it. But is it? Would he be happy now that he is amongst fellow Magicians?

Apparently this book or Grossman tried to remind us, we all have magic inside us. It's a matter are we strong enough to use it? To learn it? That...more

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Dec 05, 2012 Bill Blume rated it 2 of 5 stars

Lev Grossman's THE MAGICIANS reads like a book which can't decide if it wants to be a love letter or a "Dear John" to the Harry Potter and Narnia books which inspire children to believe in magic. The book left me undecided on how I wanted to feel about it, too.

On the one hand, I found a hell of a lot to hate about this book. The chief reason would be the main character Quentin Coldwater. I found him arrogant, self-absorbed, and at times, just despicable. Oh, and I left out whiny. Don't get me wr...more Lev Grossman's THE MAGICIANS reads like a book which can't decide if it wants to be a love letter or a "Dear John" to the Harry Potter and Narnia books which inspire children to believe in magic. The book left me undecided on how I wanted to feel about it, too.

On the one hand, I found a hell of a lot to hate about this book. The chief reason would be the main character Quentin Coldwater. I found him arrogant, self-absorbed, and at times, just despicable. Oh, and I left out whiny. Don't get me wrong. I get where Grossman is going with Quentin and this book, in general. The whole point behind THE MAGICIANS is to take the ideas of "Harry Potter" with its school for magic and Narnia with its promise of a "perfect" fantasy world and bitch slap it with a heavy dose of reality. In that respect, the book is brilliant. The kind of people who would do best with magic are those with an emptiness in their souls, a hunger for something in life that is never sated, and that theory makes so much sense. Quentin spends his journey through this book, which starts with his strange recruitment into a secret, hidden school for aspiring magicians called Brakebills Academy, searching in vain for something to make his life feel better. Ultimately, he even reaches the fantasy world he's long hoped to see and never thought could possibly be real. I couldn't celebrate any of it, because Quentin sucks. It's never a good sign when your favorite moment in a book is the main character's girlfriend punching him and knocking his cheating ass to the ground.

I'd be lying if I didn't admit to liking certain things about this book. Grossman's writing, though a far cry from perfect, still manages to drag me along for the entire journey. I've abandoned books in the past, and part of me wanted to with this one. Still I stayed in from first page to last. The same desire for some perfect pill to solve all of Quentin's problems in life also sparked a hope in me as a reader that maybe there really would be something like that at the end of the book. I desperately wanted something hopeful to appear in the end, but it doesn't. To add insult to injury, THE MAGICIANS leaves you with a bit of a cliffhanger ending, too, as if to say, "Well, maybe you'll find that ending you were looking for in the next book." Um, no. Thanks, Lev, but I'm getting off this ride.

Part of the reason is that for all the work Grossman has clearly put into building Brakebills and the magical world of Fillory (his Narnia knockoff), the setting just falls short of being credible. The whole idea of this school for magicians comes across as absurd here as it did for me in the Harry Potter books (yes, I'm not a Harry Potter fan). All too often, the magic in this book seemed to serve no purpose other than to provide an excuse for Brakebills to exist. There's no clear idea that there's any way in which a magician can make a living, much less money, from being a magician. Ironically, Grossman even points this out halfway through the book, how empty life after graduation is for the magicians of this world. Instead of adding a layer of realism to the book, it only highlights the flaw in the machine.

The setting also suffers from all sorts of small details that just make no sense. Part of that would be the insane amount of alcohol that flows into the campus of Brakebills for the main character and his friends to imbibe. I'm not so much bothered by the fact these kids are drinking underage on campus. No, it's the fact no one ever seems to go off-campus to get the stuff. Now, that's real magic, folks. Booze just appears without the main character or any of the other lesser newbs to the school getting sent on a beer run.

I can point out all sorts of things that bothered me with this book, places where the writing suddenly falls short in handling a character's reaction or providing a transition, how the book loses all sorts of momentum when it finally reaches the magical world of Fillory in the third act of the book, and elements that serve no purpose beyond shock value. Yet, for all my griping, I can't deny the fact that I finished the damn thing. Grossman's writing proves strong enough to make me hope as a reader, and that thin thread dragged me the whole way.

Perhaps my favorite subplot to the book centers on one of Quentin's friends from his pre-Brakebills life. Julia is also tested for recruitment into the magicians school, but she doesn't make the cut. How this impacts her life is fascinating. In some ways, I think this would have made a better story, but its only real purpose in THE MAGICIANS seems to be providing a set-up for book two. That's a pity, because I don't think I can stomach spending more time with Quentin to find out the rest of Julia's story.

On a closing note, I'm opting for a rating of two stars, but I'd say it's really more of two-and-a-half stars. That would more truly reflect my divided reaction to the book.(less)

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