The Magicians by Lev Grossman

Everything I read about this novel made it sound great, like Harry Potter for adults. I had been really excited to read it, but unfortunately I found myself disappointed. This book is nothing like an adult version of Harry Potter, unless by adult you mean that it's more depressing than fun and not imaginative. Despite being a book about magicians, it never once felt magical. Instead, most of the book was dark, dull and frequently downright boring.

The Magicians is the story of Quentin Coldwater, a high school senior obsessed with tales of Fillory, a fictional land that is part of a book series that is the equivalent of the Chronicles of Narnia. On a rainy day in Brooklyn Quentin finds himself transported to a magician's academy in upstate New York where he spends five years learning magic before being thrust out into the real world.

The first two-thirds of the book describes Quentin's school curriculum, mostly a lot of unconnected stories that quickly skim through five years of schooling. Occasionally there is a small tidbit that becomes more important to the overall storyline, which doesn't really even pick up until the final 150 or so pages of the novel.

After graduation Quentin and his friends discover Fillory is real, and travel there using a magical button that first takes them to an in-between dimension filled with countless fountains you must jump into to travel between worlds. Sound familiar? Maybe because you read something very similiar in Lewis' The Magician's Nephew. And that isn't the only parallel to Lewis' works. This entire novel is basically an amalgam of every classic fantasy novel you've ever read.

I also had trouble with this book because no matter how hard I tried, I did not like the main character at all. I couldn't find a single redeeming characteristic in him, which may have been intentional, given the theme of the novel, but it bothered me a lot.

The overall theme of this novel isn't a happy one; in fact it's pretty much the opposite. It's all about learning that sometimes our fantasies don't always turn out the way we would like them to, and we should be happy with the life we've been given; don't keep looking for a better life than the one you have. The darknes of this story and the harshness of reality, even a magical reality, really does make a great concept for a novel. Unfortunately, the way this story was told didn't take advantage of that concept.

While I'm sure The Magicians have some fans, I'm definitely not one of them. While I refused to give up reading it, I never truly got into the novel. The entire time I pictured the author as a child who spent his entire life searching for Narnia and is still disappointed he never found it. Or, maybe it's the opposite. Maybe he found out too soon that Narnia didn't exist after all, like learning too soon that Santa Claus isn't real.

I think this is the first novel I've read this year that I can honestly say I didn't really enjoy at all. As I said before, I think what the writer was trying to say with this novel could have been interesting. I just think he leaned a little too heavily on already published works and didn't establish enough of his own story. It's always disappointing when a novel fails to live up to it's potential.