The Magicians (The Magicians, #1) in Ultimate Popsugar Reading Challenge

Jan 08, 2010 martha rated it liked it

Shelves: year-2010, speculative-fiction

It's hard to know how to talk about this without giving too much away. I like the comparison another reviewer made: like The Great Gatsby crossed over with Harry Potter and the Narnia books. So you've got magic school and adventures, but lots of bleak realism -- all of which meant I raced through this, but Quentin's constant ennui and depression kept it from being really satisfying emotionally.

Also: obviously Fillory = Narnia, but for a really hardcore Narnia fan like, uh, me, the subtle allusio ...more

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Jul 18, 2011 Ann rated it did not like it

Quentin, the main character, is a geek who loves fantasy novels about a world called Fillory (ahem, Narnia) and the four British children who get transported there through a clock (er, a wardrobe). He finds out magic is indeed real when, to his surprise, he is invited to a magic college called Brakebills. He spends 5 years learning magic and then goes off into the real world where he finds some other surprising things exist.

This book was billed as Harry Potter for grownups, and got a lot of good Quentin, the main character, is a geek who loves fantasy novels about a world called Fillory (ahem, Narnia) and the four British children who get transported there through a clock (er, a wardrobe). He finds out magic is indeed real when, to his surprise, he is invited to a magic college called Brakebills. He spends 5 years learning magic and then goes off into the real world where he finds some other surprising things exist.

This book was billed as Harry Potter for grownups, and got a lot of good press. It did not live up to my expectations. Here is why:

1. It's completely unoriginal. Grossman draws mostly from C.S. Lewis, but he also steals from Madeline L'Engle and of course JK Rowling. And probably some others, but I haven't read a lot of fantasy.

2. I'm not sure why Quentin is the main character, since he's neither the best magician nor the smartest nor the fairest nor the kindest, or anything else. Actually, all of the characters are pretty lame and suffer from a lot of angst and malaise. And, there are a lot of characters that serve no purpose whatsoever.

3. The "college" they attend is lame. It feels more like boarding school. I mean, what college has prefects? And college is five years...for no reason. And it draaaags on and on.

4. Every student at Brakebills is assigned a specialty, or a discipline. Quentin is, like, soooo magical, that he can't be grouped, so the teachers put him in with the Physical magicians and he just tags along everywhere. I thought this had the potential for an interesting story. But Grossman totally ignores it. At the end of college, he says something like, "he didn't even know what his discipline was, but he had stopped caring." And then at the end of the book, someone says to Quentin, "don't you even want to find out what your discipline is?" WTF? That's not something that should have been left unresolved until a sequel. In fact, the teachers never should have let Quentin graduate without a discipline AND with such a lame final project that he botched so badly.

5. Almost all of the reviews I read spoiled what would have been the only interesting "twist" in the book. I kept waiting for this event to happen, and it didn't happen until the last 100 pages or so. So, in other words, don't read any other reviews of this book (including the ones on goodreads or amazon). Why on earth would they put the biggest spoiler in all of the reviews? I think it might have been a decent book without this huge giveaway. But no matter what, it's no Harry Potter.
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Jan 19, 2010 Lydia Presley rated it it was ok

Shelves: fiction, fantasy, 2010, dark-fiction

I wanted to love this book and frantically send out recommendations for people to read it. I still will do the latter, but .. perhaps not as frantically and not to as many people as I thought I might.

Kari from Through a Glass, Darkly (who is awesome and you should totally read her blog) recommended an article here . In it, John Granger says, " The Magicians isn’t ‘Harry Potter for Grown-Ups..." and I completely agree. While it shares similarities (in addition to sharing similarities to several ...more

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Jan 20, 2017 Hannah added it

Shelves: grownups-fiction, fantasy, 2017

It is really hard to separate out my thoughts on the book given that the book starts with a million pages of blurbs that unnecessarily and overzealously insult a certain comp title in the most obvious, un-useful way. I think it's funny (read: SAD!) when people who are paid to be creative writers write such uninspired, lazy, un-creative blurbs. Comp titles are great for sales; they are unnecessary for blurbs, especially when those blurbs don't actually blurb the fucking book but just take the opp It is really hard to separate out my thoughts on the book given that the book starts with a million pages of blurbs that unnecessarily and overzealously insult a certain comp title in the most obvious, un-useful way. I think it's funny (read: SAD!) when people who are paid to be creative writers write such uninspired, lazy, un-creative blurbs. Comp titles are great for sales; they are unnecessary for blurbs, especially when those blurbs don't actually blurb the fucking book but just take the opportunity to rag on the comp title that the self-important blurb writers so aggressively want us to know they are too good for.

This book is poorly paced, but the world is well designed, and I love metafiction, and this gets meta-meta, so POINTS! It is a pretty perfect depiction of young adult ennui, which I appreciate, though it also annoys me because white guys being depressed is The Most Basic Thing Ever, and having seen season one of the show, I was hoping for a little more depth or a little more focus on Julia or Eliot, since they are people who are self aware about their ennui instead of just drowning in it. But I shouldn't use an adaptation to judge the original.

So let me judge the original. Again, magic school makes me happy no matter what, so I was onboard for the ride right away. But it did distract me a lot to see how quintessentially and typically white guy so much of the descriptors and narration were. Classic shit that I hate in White Guy Literary Fiction, like weird and random mentions of random Native American tribes to describe anything from clothing to a person's appearance or behavior, and sentences like "she was, as far as Quentin was able to ascertain such things, a lesbian." Basically, Quentin is just basic, which is fine, except I'm not convinced that Grossman was wholly aware of that and doing it consciously. Sometimes it's clear that it's conscious, but other times not so much.

The Fillory novels are SO Narniaesque that I feel like it would have been better to actually just use Narnia, frankly. I think it actually becomes confusing since the book integrates Fillory into its world so seamlessly that you forget that the books aren't real, and then when something is mentioned that is NOT from Narnia, it throws you off, because most of the stuff is a carbon copy of Narnia and the Pevensies.

I'm writing this review two days late and have already started reading the sequel, though I already don't love it, so who knows where that will go. But honestly, I think in many ways the show actually improved on its source material quite a bit. ...more

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Feb 07, 2011 Jennifer rated it really liked it

Shelves: fantasy

For most of the book, I found Quentin and his fellow magicians to be blisteringly annoying. I really didn't care, and I really cared even less in the post-school days. But then. Somehow in the last 100 pages or so, I decided to go along with the ride. I still hate Quentin. I still find this to be a relatively inferior fantasy book. But I somehow was able to let go of my frustrations with the prose style and the insipid characters enough to enjoy the idea of this world- and to my great surprise I ...more

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Apr 13, 2012 taeli rated it liked it

Shelves: audiobook, audible

finished 9/12/14

Most reviews of this book tend to compare it to Harry Potter but other than the fact that the characters go to a school for magic, there's not much Harry Potter-like to this story. It's a lot more Narnia, (especially the Fillory stuff) than Hogwarts. That said, I expected Fillory to come up much earlier in the book than it did. The audiobook is 17+ hours long and Fillory doesn't come into play until nearly 5 hours to the end of the book.

I liked the book but wasn't as bowled over ...more

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Aug 24, 2010 Morgan rated it did not like it

Uggh. This book had potential, but turned out to be like harry potter meets chronicles of narnia starring the worst and most annoying angsty, jerky teenagers ever. If these were my kids, I'd smack them. Hard a hard time loving the protagonists and did a lot of flipping to get through this. ALSO, the plot was terrible! ...more

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Oct 12, 2009 Katie rated it liked it

A bit tedious at times, and the ending was not what I expected/hoped for, but overall it was enjoyable.

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Aug 18, 2009 Jenni rated it really liked it

Shelves: 50-books-in-2011

This was a great book. Very excited for the sequel to come out in August. In an era of authors trying to duplicate certain genre phenominom, this book stood out. It had all the qualities, details, etc. I look for and enjoy. Definitely gave you a little sense of de ja vu - a little Narnia, a little Harry and a little bit of this and that thrown in but was unique.

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May 14, 2009 Julie rated it liked it

Shelves: fantasy-scifi

Not nearly as good as I thought it was going to be. Basically disects the fantasy genre as a whole. Too much theorizing. Think Harry Potter goes to college but it isn't all he thought it would be. Wouldn't recommend. ...more

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