Quentin Coldwater is brilliant but miserable. A senior in high school, he’s still secretly preoccupied with a series of fantasy novels he read as a child, set in a magical land called Fillory. Imagine his surprise when he finds himself unexpectedly admitted to a very secret, very exclusive college of magic in upstate New York, where he receives a thorough and rigorous education in the craft of modern sorcery.
He also discovers all the other things people learn in college: friendship, love, sex, booze, and boredom. Something is missing, though. Magic doesn’t bring Quentin the happiness and adventure he dreamed it would. After graduation he and his friends make a stunning discovery: Fillory is real. But the land of Quentin’s fantasies turns out to be much darker and more dangerous than he could have imagined. His childhood dream becomes a nightmare with a shocking truth at its heart.
First Line: "Quentin did a magic trick. Nobody noticed."
Random Quote: "The next hour was a jumble of unfamiliar rooms and people leaning down to talk to him earnestly and dab at this face with rough cloths. An older woman with an enormous bosom whom he'd never seen before worked a spell with cedar and thyme that made his face feel better."
Review: I really enjoyed this book and had it not been for the last sections it would have been a five star book, easily. I am a sucker for a certain kind of book about college that combines an oddball school with a mysterious crowd of cool kids, fantasy elements, and tragedy. The two books that best capture this are The Secret History
and Waking the Moon
- The Magicians
just joined those ranks.
Quentin Coldwater is a disaffected teen who has done everything he's supposed to do and excelled academically and socially, but he's bored and unfulfilled and wondering what it all means. When a dead body at his Princeton interview leads to the exclusive world of Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy and an alternate way of growing up, he's hooked. Quentin falls in with the crowd of Physical magicians, acquires his first lover, and sails through college and into a dissolute and aimless life in New York City with ease and grace. When the door opens into Fillory, his favorite ever storybook land, he knows that magic has brought him his heart's desire. Or maybe not.
Grossman is writing about a lot of things in this novel, but I think the most important one is all about reading. There is a certain kind of kid who escapes the real world into books, especially fantasies, and in some ways never returns even into adulthood. I know this because I was one of those kids, moving from the Andrew Lang fairy tales, to Narnia and Middle Earth, and on into all the books of adulthood. I still escape into my book when it all gets to be too much and, like Quentin, if I found a way into Narnia I'd go in a heartbeat. But there can be consequences to living too much in your head, just as there can be consequences for living too much out of it and Grossman gets that. He gets the absolute joy and danger of reading and I loved this book for that.
What I did not love is his handling of the aftermath of school and the escape in Fillory. It felt rushed and predictable and oddly conventional. The relationships between the characters, so strong in most of the book become strained and he doesn't seem to know what to do with that. The incidental characters of the fantasy world are just that - incidental - and that feels like a betrayal of all the best elements of reading good fantasy - that even though those characters can't be real - they feel real!
Despite its flaws I enjoyed this book and I suspect I'll look for it again the next time I re-read the other two books I mentioned earlier. I wonder what he's going to write next?
Reading Challenges: Speculative Fiction Challenge 2010, 2010 100+ Reading Challenge, 2010 A to Z Reading Challenge, 2010 Support Your Local Library Reading Challenge
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great review. i liked this one even though it is not the type of book i would normally enjoy.
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