Lev Grossman’s The Magicians has many elements that I like in a novel – young protagonists, magic, magic schools, etc. In spite of all these things going for it, I had to force myself to finish it, probably won’t seek out the other two novels in the trilogy, and will end up writing more than I should about it here for CBR. I always write more when I dislike something. The Magicians is the story of Quentin Coldwater, a boring young Brooklyn teenager who suddenly […]
Beam me up, Scotty; there’s no intelligent life here
I can’t remember if Grossman summarized the book this way in the introduction (which is sadly the most entertaining part of the book) but this is trying really hard to be the gen x-ers Secret Life of Walter Mitty, but returning to the relatively few 170-some pages isn’t something I have any desire to do to go back and check. a) I understand why you’d daydream this particular existence away, but b) the daydreams aren’t fleshed out and are impossible to follow as a result, […]
The redemption of Quentin Coldwater.
“He’d been right about the world, but he was wrong about himself. The world was a desert, but he was a magician, and to be a magician was to be a secret spring – a moving oasis. He wasn’t desolate, and he wasn’t empty. He was full of emotion, full of feelings, bursting with them, and when it came down to it, that’s what being a magician was. They weren’t ordinary feelings – they weren’t the tame, domesticated kind. Magic was wild feelings, the kind […]
Grossman does The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Pretty sure Quentin is the Eustace.
“The hero pays the price.” Well, shit. If you would have told me last month that not only would I give The Magicians (THE MAGICIANS) four stars, but that I would get so worked up by its sequel that I would burst into tears, I would NOT have believed you. I got soooooo mad and weird when I read The Magicians five years ago, I swore I would never read any sequels, or anything else Lev Grossman ever wrote, and then somewhere along the line […]
I did such a 180 on this series, you guys. I can’t even believe it.
Sometimes you read a book and you go temporarily insane. The first time I read this book, I’m pretty sure this happened to me. At the very least, I experienced some sort of existential crisis while trying to sort out my feelings for it. I definitely remember being so upset and flamboozled that I started crying while writing my review over on Goodreads. I still think this book could have maybe been executed a little bit differently to let the readers know that Grossman was […]
400 Pages of I Just Can’t Even
I never liked Holden Caulfield. Crucify me if you must, but I did make the mistake of reading Catcher in the Rye as an adult, with adult sense and sensibilities. So I was really not sympathetic to Holden Caulfield at Hogwarts and I’m certainly not taking Holden Caulfield’s shit in Narnia either. Quentin (the Holdeness of all Caulfields) and his band of self-adsorbed fellow magicians now reign in Fillory (it really is Narnia adjacent) as self-adsorbed despots. Grossman loves to play with genres and tropes, but I […]