The Magicians by Lev Grossman

[lightreads]

The Magicians by Lev Grossman


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Short version: rocked my socks! Shame about the protagonist, though.

Longer version: Extremely gifted and alienated seventeen-year-old boy is swept away from his Princeton interview to the entrance examinations for a secret college of magic. Quentin passes, matriculates, learns magic, and emerges on the other side not perceptibly happier than he came in. Then he and his friends discover a way into Fillory, the not!Narnia realm of the fantasy novels Quentin has never outgrown loving.

Ooh. I could sit here and make intellectually satisfied noises about how well this book's meta works – the allusions and homage's to the genre greats (including Harry Potter, natch), the reflections on the shape of story, the thematic conversation about what magic is and what it means to be an adult who believes in it. And the book does function very well on that meta level. But it's also a damn fine fantasy novel, with momentum and wonder and terror and humor. And writing, oh God. Writing that, more than once, socked me in the stomach and knocked the breath right out of me. Every fantasy novel that talks about the learning of magic from now on will be measured against the first half of this book, and most of them will be found wanting.

The problem is, though, that I periodically wanted to punch Quentin in his privileged, self-absorbed face. Gaah! The only thing that makes it bearable is that just when you want to grab him and shake him and tell him to OMG grow the fuck up, that's when Grossman is exercising the finest muscular control over the story. Quentin has to be the way he is for the book to work, for it to deconstruct coming-of-age fantasies the way it does, and I'm really glad it does. And because Grossman has compassion for Quentin, I found a few grains too, because every character in this book is broken in an awful or interesting way, but it just happens that our protagonist's way gets right up my nose.

Did I mention the amazing writing?

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Comments

[lightreads.livejournal.com]

And I believe his brother (twin, maybe?) is also a novelist of some geeky fame.