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The Magicians
March 2020: Other Books
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The Magicians - Lev Grossman - 1* (and I'm being generous af)
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HAHAHAHAHA!!! I had very similar feeling about this book as you. It. Was. Horrible. And, somehow the author writes two more books and got a tv show out of it.
Well, I am one of the ones that liked it-I can see how some might not...for me it was a very fun series.
Put me in the one star club! I never DNF a book, but by the end of this thing I was flipping pages so quickly, that I was just in desperation looking for something interesting to catch my eye. I kept hoping the story would somehow all of a sudden grab me, but alas, I was confounded! I could have been reading Egyptian hieroglyphics or electrical engineering. It’s sort of pissed me off.
I was extremely generous in giving this 2 stars - probably only because I was able to finish it, gagging towards the end. We've been watching (kinda sorta - I doze through most of it while my husband watches) the TV series and it's just as bad IMO.
Haha that was a GREAT review (that I clearly did not agree with). Love scathing reviewsI absolutely adore this series and will surely read them all again (but disliked the offshoot comics and don’t plan on watching the series)
I think I put it as ok (3 stars)? I even added the 2nd book, thinking I'd give it a try and see if I wanted to continue on. But, thinking back, I just remember it being kind of boring, so I have no recollection why I rated it "ok".
Read this recently though I haven’t reviewed it yet. I see I ended up rounding it up to 3 stars but I really can’t remember why. Must have been because something finally did happen. I found most of it deeply annoying - it came very close to a DNF. Odd because I usually like self-conscious mimicry quite a lot
I finally took this book off my TBR after seeing a number of reviews that basically said "I enjoyed the show, but I couldn't get into the book [for reasons very similar to yours]." The first season of the show was kind of fun, but I wandered away and haven't been back.
Elise, best review ever! I hated it too. So much potential, so much boredom.
*This will contain spoilers!*
Quentin Coldwater is a pretentious bored seventeen-year-old from Brooklyn. After one chapter he gets pulled into this magical school, Brakebills, where he gets accepted. As he’s obsessed with a series of children’s books in which magic exists, he thinks his dream is coming true.
Spoiler alert: it’s not.
So he meets a slew of other characters who are just as unlikeable as he is. He skips a year because the author probably couldn’t bother writing the whole five years. He gets turned into a goose and flies to Antarctica, which made me seriously ask myself whether this book was supposed to be taken seriously. He becomes an arctic fox for a day and fucks a girl in his class. Oh and at some point there’s a rip in the fabric of the universe and a Beast from another dimension shows up and eats one of his classmates.
Then they graduate and they all go back to Brooklyn. Quentin cheats on his girlfriend, and then gets super mad at her when she then sleeps with someone else. That’s some manipulative misogynistic sh*t right there.
By then we’re at 75% of the book and, in Quentin’s own words, “It’s about f*cking time something happened.”
Someone from school whom they haven’t talked to in years shows up with a magic button from those books Quentin loves, but Quentin decides that his lifelong dreams be damned, this is ridiculous. But then his girlfriend sleeps with someone else and he decides it’s time to go. So they all go to
a sad rip-off of NarniaFillory, where a bunch of animals inexplicably try to kill them, and then they have an epic fight, and then Quentin gets abandoned in Fillory because his arm got ripped off, and he goes on the most boring quest ever to come back to Brooklyn.Where he decides that magic is evil and he wants nothing more to do with it... all while working at a job secured by magic, paid for by magic and where he gets to do nothing all day because magic prevents his coworkers from wondering wtf he’s doing there. And when his friends show up with a plan to go back to
fake-NarniaFillory, he thinks about it for all of two seconds before jumping back into magic.So clearly, I did not enjoy this :D
I read it because it was touted as a Harry Potter for adults. I guess it’s a bit like HP, except with more sex, more booze, more swearing, less plot (but somehow more plot holes) and less character development.
In On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, Stephen King compares the imagination of a story to archaeology: you carefully clean sand away from the bones of the story until you have a whole skeleton, an entire plot you can write. This is like that, except Grossman dropped the skeleton and it broke in a thousand pieces, but then he wrote it anyway and published it without getting it edited.
TL;DR: Don’t bother with this one if you value your time.
Also, where the f*ck did Gretchen’s cane go?!