The Magicians (The Magicians, #1)

by Lev Grossman

Suppose it really was a school for magic. Was it any good? What if he’d stumbled into some third-tier magic college by accident? He had to think practically. He didn’t want to be committing himself to some community college of sorcery when he could have Magic Harvard or whatever. “Don’t you want to see my SATs?”

He was experimenting cautiously with the idea of being happy,

The one student he and every other First Year at Brakebills was immediately obsessed with was little Alice, of the tiny glass creature, but it quickly became apparent that in spite of being way ahead of the rest of her year academically she was cripplingly shy, to the point where there wasn’t much point in trying to talk to her.

He recognized the irritable, unpleasant, unhappy person he was becoming: he looked strangely like the Quentin he thought he’d left behind in Brooklyn.

Quentin had passed, Alice had passed, and Penny had failed.

As he got closer he took an extra little skip step, cocked his arm back, and punched Quentin in the face.

There are certain spells . . . if you lose control of them, they will change you. Consume you. Transform you into something not human, a niffin, a spirit of raw, uncontrolled magical energy.”

“Penny,” Quentin said. “One, your hair is stupid. And two, I don’t know what it’s like where you come from, but if you ever do anything that could get me sent back to Brooklyn again, I won’t just break your nose. I will motherfucking kill you.”

“Are you kidding? That guy was a mystery wrapped in an enigma and crudely stapled to a ticking fucking time bomb. He was either going to hit somebody or start a blog. To tell you the truth I’m kind of glad he hit you.”

He didn’t know yet that Amanda Orloff was dead. The Beast had eaten her alive.

The basic facts were common knowledge: every year in September half the Fourth Years swiftly and silently disappeared from the House overnight. No one discussed their absence. The vanished Fourth Years reappeared at the end of December looking thin and drawn and generally chewed over, to no particular comment—it was considered fatally bad form to say anything about it. They quietly mixed back into the general Brakebills population, and that was that. The rest of the Fourth Years vanished in January and came back at the end of April.

“I bet they make us go to normal college. Just some random state school where we have to read Cannery Row and debate the Stamp Act. And like the second day Eliot’s going to be crying in the bathroom and begging for his foie gras and his malbec while some jock sodomizes him with a lacrosse stick.” “Um, did that just turn into your total gay fantasy halfway through?” Janet asked.

You will not enjoy the time you spend at Brakebills South. I do not encourage you to try.”

“Yeah, nobody else went out but you two. What—you think we’re stupid?”

And she understood that. She seemed to know everything about Quentin, everything he was thinking and feeling, sometimes before he did, and she wanted him in spite of it—because of it.

I think she was from Connecticut, but not fancy Connecticut, with the money and the Kennedy cousins and the Lyme disease. I think she was from New Haven, or Bridgeport.

“What happened to the professor?” “You haven’t figured it out?” Janet didn’t bother to conceal her glee. “They gave him a choice: resign in disgrace . . . or transfer to Antarctica. Brakebills South. Guess which one he took.” “Oh my God,” Josh said. “It was Mayakovsky.”

I always thought my brother died in a car crash.” “Your brother?” Quentin froze. “I don’t understand.” “He was eight years older than me. My parents told me he died in a car crash. But that was him, I’m sure it was.” “I don’t understand. You think he was that boy in the story?”

“That’s why you weren’t Invited here,” he said quietly. “It has to be. Because of what happened to your brother.”

The only real trick was avoiding the fourth prefect, because the fourth prefect was, of all people, Penny.

He knew the rules here instinctively, what it meant to have parents who ignored you. The only difference was that his parents did it because they loved each other, Alice’s because they hated each other.

No one would come right out and say it, but the worldwide magical ecology was suffering from a serious imbalance: too many magicians, not enough monsters.

“Why do you think, Quentin? I came because of you. I came here because I wanted to take care of you.”

Martin halted his slow advance to observe as Alice became a niffin.

It was—the author explained in the first paragraph—the first book of Fillory and Further by somebody who had actually been there. That person was Jane Chatwin.

But it was unmistakably her. The paramedic, and the woman who’d visited him in the infirmary. And yet that wasn’t who she was at all. “You’re Jane Chatwin, aren’t you?” She smiled brightly and nodded.

“Try not to judge Martin too harshly,” she said from the doorway. “Plover used to diddle him whenever he could get him alone. I think that’s why he went to Fillory in the first place. Why else would he try to crawl into a grandfather clock? He was looking for somewhere to hide.”

If there was a moral to the story of Martin Chatwin, that was it in a nutshell. Sure, you can live out your dreams, but it’ll only turn you into a monster. Better to stay home and do card tricks in your bedroom instead.

Years ago Quentin had worked out exactly what he would wish for if anybody ever gave him the chance. He would wish to travel to Fillory and to be allowed to stay there forever. But that was years ago. “Send me home,” he said.

It was Emily Greenstreet. The one and only and infamous. The girl Alice’s brother had died for.