Book Notes: The Magicians

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Lev Grossman's  fantasy epic The Magicians wasn't the book I read in a week.  In fact, I read the sequel The Magican King as my book last week, but I wanted to go back to the original in terms of providing a review.  It'll provide people with a better jumping on point for their own reading, and I think the germ of everything that is awesome about The Magician King is to be found in that first book.

The Magicians is a book about, you guessed it, magicians.  Quentin Coldwater is the main character of the book, and he begins as a regular kid on the streets of New York City.  He's on his way to an interview for college when his whole life changes.  Enter magic.  The rest of the novel, and the subsequent sequels, unfolds from this moment, and much of the second book hinges on the repercussions of these early pages.  

For those of you who are familiar with Harry Potter and the Chronicles of Narnia, you'll be pleasantly surprised by the references and threads that weave throughout this book.  While The Magicians calls its land Fillory instead of Narnia, and it was ruled by four English schoolchildren named the Chatwins instead of the Pevensies, Grossman has found a way to reinvent many of the tropes that worked its way through those books.  

Grossman's magic makes the book.  His conceptions and conjurings feel gritty and grounded, even as the laws of physics bend in fanciful ways.  Pain and endurance infiltrate magic throughout the novel, and the lessons learned by Quentin and his friends exceeds lessons in spellcasting and reside more in real character lessons.  Magic does not come easy, and the young students find their spirits and character tested in a way that all great literature captures.  The character development never falters throughout the novel, and readers will find themselves rooting not just for Quentin, but the rest of the cast as well.  

While this book is billed as a "coming-of-age" novel, its story reads more like a "coming alive" novel.  It's about how the spirit survives modern trials, and Grossman's prose elevates all of the critical character moments in real and exciting ways.  The apathetic Quentin Coldwater and his fellow young adults feel real, but never quite lapse into the overly whiny characters that sometimes plague novels about this age group.  Quentin is a problematic character, one plagued with a sense of self-doubt, but his journey throughout the first book take him to a satsifying resolution that doesn't "solve" his problematic aspects, but simply move him to a new status quo that will prove to be equally problematic in the next books.  

For lovers of Chronicles of Narnia and Harry Potter, this book is a must read.  It's a fantastic book about magic and the price one pays to wield it.  It attacks more adult themes than either of those other series manage to tackle, and it is better for it.  The Magicians was one of my favorite reads of the last year.  I was so thoroughly pleased with the book that I ran to pick up the sequel.  Now I am in the uncomfortable position of waiting to pick up the third and final book of the trilogy.  It's a wait I will endure, for if the first two books are any indication of Grossman's gifts, then I will be rewarded for my patience.