The Magicians: A Novel - Lev Grossman

Date Started: 9/19/11
Date Finished: 9/26/11

One-Word Summary: Bizarre

So this was an Amazon Best of the Month, August 2009 choice. I'm a little behind the curve reading it I supposed but whatever. I read a little about the book - it seemed like a combination of Harry Potter and the Chronicles of Narnia - cool right? Well, yes, but this one was bizarre, and NOT appropriate for children.

The Publishers Weekly review of this book calls it a "derivative fantasy thriller". I guess so. Here's the thing - Fillory, the world that the characters discover (though not until over two thirds of the book is through) is almost an exact copy of Narnia - only tawdry. As someone who read, and loved, the Narnia books, reading about Fillory felt...kind of sad in comparison. I get that it's a creative re-telling, it's just hard to see a story so beloved be...so twisted. Clearly the author must know the Narnia books, I just wonder how much regard he held for them when he wrote this story.

Aside from this (major) issue, I didn't love the characters. The character I liked the most was Julia and she appears for barely 5 pages, if that (and what about her remembering the test at Brakebills? I feel like there was a story left hanging with her and kept expecting her to show up again). I also liked Alice - and her blow-up at Quentin after he cheated on her with Janet (and Eliot?) was epic. But she gets killed off in the end. And frankly, being stuck with Quentin as our narrator is no picnic. He is petulant and never happy; he feels slighted but looks down on others. In short, he is not the most likable narrator. As for the others, there isn't enough development for me to care. Janet is a slut who gets sick in the Interworld for some reason, Josh seems to be in the plot for the sole reason that he can create magical black holes and Eliot is the alcoholic of the group who finds redemption in Fillory (or at least something that will keep him from turning to the bottle first thing in the morning). None of them inspired me to care. Actually, the only other person I cared about was Penny because at least he was interesting. Though at the conclusion of the book we still don't know if he survived having both of his hands bit off by the Beast (i.e., Martin Chatwin, one of the original Chatwins in the Plover stories of Fillory, who wandered off and never returned to Earth).

Look, I'll probably read the recently released sequel, if nothing else because I'm curious. I liked this book but I didn't love it. I wish the author had dedicated it to C.S. Lewis, without whom this story wouldn't exist.