Fiction Addict

Genre: Fantasy

Publisher: Viking

Publication Date: December 1, 2009

Reviewed by Josh Olds

Quentin is just a normal everyday kid. Well, becoming an adult, now that he’s in his senior year of high school. College is just around the bend, and Quentin has his eye set on Princeton. That’s when everything changes. When he arrives at his interview for admission to Princeton, he finds the interviewer dead with a manila envelope bearing Quentin’s name. The contents of that envelope would change his life.

Through coincidence, or perhaps not, he loses a piece of paper out of the envelope and goes running after it into some underbrush. When he looks up, he finds that winter has turned to summer, and is in the Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy, a school for magicians hidden by magic in upper New York. The Magicians details Quentin’s life through his time at Brakebills, into his life as an adult wizard. It is Quentin’s coming of age saga, and the reader experiences Quentin’s deepest hurts, darkest pleasures, and greatest victories.

Having gone through his Harry Potter phase, Quentin graduates from his version of Hogwarts and enters upon his journey into the Narnia phase. When a fellow wizard discovers a thought-to-be-fictional button from a thought-to-be-fictional book that takes them to intermediate lands, a direct reference to Narnia’s Wood Between the Words. Instead of heading to Narnia, Quentin and his magical companions embark on a quest in the land of Fillory. But all is not as it seems in Fillory. In truth, it might be more dangerous than the books presented it.

Aptly described as Harry Potter meets Narnia for adults, The Magicians pays homage to the classics of fantasy almost to the point of being derivative. Be forewarned. Brakebills isn’t Hogwarts and Fillory isn’t Narnia. Far from being children’s tales, Grossman presents a fantasy centered on hedonistic and materialistic young wizards and their journeys through Brakebills and Fillory. The first half of the book is a seemingly disjointed set of tales centered on the magicians’ time in their magical school, but in a piece of excellent plotting Grossman ties everything in during the second half of the book, giving it one final and shocking twist.

While the writing is well-done and the characters believable, the lockstep adherence to the plots of classical works of fantasy makes me think that Grossman was trying way too hard to get his book mentioned in the same sentence as these literary masterpieces. Case in point: the land of Fillory can only be ruled by “sons and daughters of Earth.” Sound familiar C.S. Lewis fans?

In the end, Grossman has written a something that I would recommend only to fans of fantasy. It’s a decent read, but instead of trying to put itself on the shelf with the classics with its original and vibrant storytelling, it chooses instead to piggyback off its predecessors. You’d think as the book critic for Time magazine, Grossman would realize the error in this. But of course, this is same man who wrote false 5-star Amazon reviews to make his debut novel, Warp, look more appealing.