The Magicians (The Magicians, #1) in Ultimate Popsugar Reading Challenge

Jul 18, 2011 Ann rated it did not like it

Quentin, the main character, is a geek who loves fantasy novels about a world called Fillory (ahem, Narnia) and the four British children who get transported there through a clock (er, a wardrobe). He finds out magic is indeed real when, to his surprise, he is invited to a magic college called Brakebills. He spends 5 years learning magic and then goes off into the real world where he finds some other surprising things exist.

This book was billed as Harry Potter for grownups, and got a lot of good Quentin, the main character, is a geek who loves fantasy novels about a world called Fillory (ahem, Narnia) and the four British children who get transported there through a clock (er, a wardrobe). He finds out magic is indeed real when, to his surprise, he is invited to a magic college called Brakebills. He spends 5 years learning magic and then goes off into the real world where he finds some other surprising things exist.

This book was billed as Harry Potter for grownups, and got a lot of good press. It did not live up to my expectations. Here is why:

1. It's completely unoriginal. Grossman draws mostly from C.S. Lewis, but he also steals from Madeline L'Engle and of course JK Rowling. And probably some others, but I haven't read a lot of fantasy.

2. I'm not sure why Quentin is the main character, since he's neither the best magician nor the smartest nor the fairest nor the kindest, or anything else. Actually, all of the characters are pretty lame and suffer from a lot of angst and malaise. And, there are a lot of characters that serve no purpose whatsoever.

3. The "college" they attend is lame. It feels more like boarding school. I mean, what college has prefects? And college is five years...for no reason. And it draaaags on and on.

4. Every student at Brakebills is assigned a specialty, or a discipline. Quentin is, like, soooo magical, that he can't be grouped, so the teachers put him in with the Physical magicians and he just tags along everywhere. I thought this had the potential for an interesting story. But Grossman totally ignores it. At the end of college, he says something like, "he didn't even know what his discipline was, but he had stopped caring." And then at the end of the book, someone says to Quentin, "don't you even want to find out what your discipline is?" WTF? That's not something that should have been left unresolved until a sequel. In fact, the teachers never should have let Quentin graduate without a discipline AND with such a lame final project that he botched so badly.

5. Almost all of the reviews I read spoiled what would have been the only interesting "twist" in the book. I kept waiting for this event to happen, and it didn't happen until the last 100 pages or so. So, in other words, don't read any other reviews of this book (including the ones on goodreads or amazon). Why on earth would they put the biggest spoiler in all of the reviews? I think it might have been a decent book without this huge giveaway. But no matter what, it's no Harry Potter.
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Feb 07, 2011 Jennifer rated it really liked it

Shelves: fantasy

For most of the book, I found Quentin and his fellow magicians to be blisteringly annoying. I really didn't care, and I really cared even less in the post-school days. But then. Somehow in the last 100 pages or so, I decided to go along with the ride. I still hate Quentin. I still find this to be a relatively inferior fantasy book. But I somehow was able to let go of my frustrations with the prose style and the insipid characters enough to enjoy the idea of this world- and to my great surprise I ...more

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Aug 21, 2012 Mary rated it it was amazing

Excellent mash up of a Harry Potter for adults and Narnia. Love it and has read multiple times.

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Apr 13, 2012 taeli rated it liked it

Shelves: audiobook, audible

finished 9/12/14

Most reviews of this book tend to compare it to Harry Potter but other than the fact that the characters go to a school for magic, there's not much Harry Potter-like to this story. It's a lot more Narnia, (especially the Fillory stuff) than Hogwarts. That said, I expected Fillory to come up much earlier in the book than it did. The audiobook is 17+ hours long and Fillory doesn't come into play until nearly 5 hours to the end of the book.

I liked the book but wasn't as bowled over ...more

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Aug 24, 2010 Morgan rated it did not like it

Uggh. This book had potential, but turned out to be like harry potter meets chronicles of narnia starring the worst and most annoying angsty, jerky teenagers ever. If these were my kids, I'd smack them. Hard a hard time loving the protagonists and did a lot of flipping to get through this. ALSO, the plot was terrible! ...more

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