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3.43 AVERAGE
3.43 AVERAGE
This is the sort of book that immediately makes me want to start writing about it in terms of other books. There are the obvious ones, the riffs on Harry Potter, and to an even greater extent, Narnia. But then there's all the bits about privileged kids who don't feel like the world is conforming to their expectations the way it should, and it reminds me of Catcher in the Rye, or The Secret History, although with even more self-awareness that just because they feel that way, it doesn't mean that that's reasonable.
Note: The rest of this review has been withdrawn due to the changes in Goodreads policy and enforcement. You can read why I came to this decision here.
In the meantime, you can read the entire review at Smorgasbook
Note: The rest of this review has been withdrawn due to the changes in Goodreads policy and enforcement. You can read why I came to this decision here.
In the meantime, you can read the entire review at Smorgasbook
The Magicians is a book that once finished I was more than happy to literally toss it across the room with the hopes that it would land in the dog's water dish...seriously, I actually tried. It missed, so it go to go back on my store shelf, but the matter still stands. I tried to drown a book on purpose. While the overall plot has promise, the execution of it left a lot to be desired...in fact it basically made me desire an entirely different novel all together.
The story starts off full of mystery and with questions and it holds on to that for around three to four chapters before it stalled out and started wallowing in self pity. We don't get a ton of back story or world building when it comes to the school, but we do get some "great" descriptions of how utterly boring and tedious the class work is...because magic as it turns out is basically nothing but theory and textbooks. Wow...that sounds awesome. It's not that I don't like the idea of magic being hard, it's actually a really nice change of pace, it's the fact that no matter what Quentin and the others just spin their wheels over how utterly mundane it all is. They make it worse for themselves, and for me. Because if they don't give a crap, why should I? The actual schooling goes by incredibly fast in this, and then we spend another full section stalled out with more wallowing and bad life decisions, before we get to the answers to the questions posed in the first four chapters...I don't know what pisses me off more, the fact that nothing interesting happens for like 200 ages of the book or the fact that I could have skipped the entire middle section and still 'gotten' what was going on. That whole Fillory thing? Yeah...don't go into this expecting that to pop up a lot until towards the last third.
Now I will say I do understand the whole point of making the focus on Quentin and his struggles with depression, it's like a case study of how depression can basically make anything awesome seem really bleak and tedious. I actually liked that his depression wasn't magically cured by...well magic, like people suggested. But damn...depression doesn't make a person completely unlikable, grumpy and at times too tired to care? Yeah, of course...but depression doesn't give anyone a pass on being an asshole ALL THE TIME. And that's basically what the entire group of friends were, assholes. It's hard to get into a book where the characters are constantly staring at walls with alcohol glazed eyes, waiting for life to get exciting. YOU HAVE MAGIC YOU TWIT!
I'm going to say that The Magicians is a love it or leave it novel. You'll either find it enjoyable with some really great topics highlighted and pretty cool ideas (though definitely used in Narnia and HP)...or you'll be bored and frustrated. I can't say I'll be continuing this series any time in the future
The story starts off full of mystery and with questions and it holds on to that for around three to four chapters before it stalled out and started wallowing in self pity. We don't get a ton of back story or world building when it comes to the school, but we do get some "great" descriptions of how utterly boring and tedious the class work is...because magic as it turns out is basically nothing but theory and textbooks. Wow...that sounds awesome. It's not that I don't like the idea of magic being hard, it's actually a really nice change of pace, it's the fact that no matter what Quentin and the others just spin their wheels over how utterly mundane it all is. They make it worse for themselves, and for me. Because if they don't give a crap, why should I? The actual schooling goes by incredibly fast in this, and then we spend another full section stalled out with more wallowing and bad life decisions, before we get to the answers to the questions posed in the first four chapters...I don't know what pisses me off more, the fact that nothing interesting happens for like 200 ages of the book or the fact that I could have skipped the entire middle section and still 'gotten' what was going on. That whole Fillory thing? Yeah...don't go into this expecting that to pop up a lot until towards the last third.
Now I will say I do understand the whole point of making the focus on Quentin and his struggles with depression, it's like a case study of how depression can basically make anything awesome seem really bleak and tedious. I actually liked that his depression wasn't magically cured by...well magic, like people suggested. But damn...depression doesn't make a person completely unlikable, grumpy and at times too tired to care? Yeah, of course...but depression doesn't give anyone a pass on being an asshole ALL THE TIME. And that's basically what the entire group of friends were, assholes. It's hard to get into a book where the characters are constantly staring at walls with alcohol glazed eyes, waiting for life to get exciting. YOU HAVE MAGIC YOU TWIT!
I'm going to say that The Magicians is a love it or leave it novel. You'll either find it enjoyable with some really great topics highlighted and pretty cool ideas (though definitely used in Narnia and HP)...or you'll be bored and frustrated. I can't say I'll be continuing this series any time in the future
Somewhat regretful of breaking my ban on reading books by white men to read this. I can't say it wasn't entertaining, reading what would have happened if Harry Potter were set in NY with the cast of Meg Wolitzer's The Interestings, and they went through the wardrobe to a magical land.
I liked this because it's truly Alice's story. In the same way that Quentin's story is all about Quentin, Alice's story is all about Alice, and Quentin is just a bit player in it. Her own brain getting in her way, her disconnection from the world, and her ambivalence towards her parents -- not quite hate, not quite love -- go a long way to tying this book together, and I love her description of niffinhood.
I'm not sure how to describe my reaction to this book. It is Harry Potter-meets-Secret History--a twisted, depressing story about a group of elite academics and how their intellectual isolation shapes their lives. (Heart-warming, I know.) I finished it a few days ago and I am still mulling it over--This was a book that has made an impression, but definitely wasn't one to lift the mood.
“For just one second, look at your life and see how perfect it is. Stop looking for the next secret door that is going to lead you to your real life. Stop waiting. This is it: there’s nothing else. It’s here, and you’d better decide to enjoy it or you’re going to be miserable wherever you go, for the rest of your life, forever.”
[b:The Magicians|6101718|The Magicians (The Magicians #1)|Lev Grossman|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1313772941s/6101718.jpg|6278977] tells the story of a smart but cynical Brooklyn high school graduate, Quentin Coldwater, who expects the worst in life and is also a fan of the Fillory and Further books (a series of fantasy books not entirely unlike [b:The Chronicles of Narnia|11127|The Chronicles of Narnia (Chronicles of Narnia, #1-7)|C.S. Lewis|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1449868701s/11127.jpg|781271]). He finds out that magic is real and attends a college for magic called Brakebills. Later on, he also finds out that the fantasy world Fillory is real, and that what he thought Fillory was is not how Fillory truly is.
Generally, Quentin Coldwater and his friends are not really a likeable group, but I liked them, because they are very human (sometimes a little too human). Quentin is a nerd underneath all his moody, at times boring and annoying attitude. Although all of Quentin’s friends are super smart and snarky (some), they are also united by the fact that all of them are complicated and have something tragic or miserable that happened to them in the past or even the present. However, there were a few characters that I didn’t particularly like (Penny, Alice…) Penny is the arse out of all arses and Alice is perfect (I know she’s troubled and all deep down, but alright, I just wasn’t fond of her).
“If there’s a single lesson that life teaches us, it’s that wishing doesn’t make it so.”
The plot is a gritty one. Magic isn’t sparkles and rainbows or waving a wand for the magicians in this book. Magic is precise (on the surface anyway), hands have to suffer through the pain of being twisted and knead around. What looks like a perfectly normal fantasy world is actually as messy as can be, not so different from our own world, but prettier on the surface and wilder deep below. No “for sure” happy endings can be expected to happen. Admittedly, some parts of Brakebills life had my attention wandering away, but besides that, Fillory is truly enchanting.
I neither liked nor disliked the writing. Some dark jokes, not-exactly-hidden references and a lot of descriptions. At least it was that way for me. Long descriptions of rooms and buildings. Great for picturing the buildings (or rooms) in my mind, but it can be a bore sometimes. Unless you’re a fan of that kind of thing. Now and then, there are also really awesome quotes.
“It’s time to live with what we have and mourn what we lost.”
I liked how the darker themes were brought in, and I appreciate the “how terrible life actually is” thing, but maybe a happier theme intersecting with the darker ones could have made the whole story more interesting. Paying attention to the details in this book makes the fantasy in it so much more wilder and dangerous.
Overall, I liked this book well enough. Despite what it says on the book or online, this is not Harry Potter for grown-ups. It’s something completely different from Harry Potter. There’s a Narnia-ish feeling in some of the Fillory scenes, but that’s probably how discovering a new magical world reads like.
I think it's safe to say that the phenomenon that is Harry Potter is practically inescapable, especially for people coming from a certain generation. I remember the first time I encountered the series: I was around fourteen or so, and an uncle had brought home the first three books for me to read. At the time, no one in the Philippines knew what Harry Potter was, and though I fell in love with Harry and Hogwarts and all the rest, there wasn't anyone I could really talk to about it - until finally, the phenomenon reached our shores, and soon, pretty much everyone was talking about it, too.
Harry Potter did much to revitalize the reading habit, especially amongst young adults - and as a result, threw wide open the floodgates that would pave the way for things like Twilight and, in essence the enormous industry of young-adult fiction. All of a sudden what was once a tiny section of a bookstore suddenly became a marketing goldmine, and pretty much everybody has cashed in.
They say that imitation is the best form of flattery, and I suppose in some ways the fact that a large number of Harry Potter-type variants that emerged in the few years after it became a huge hit (but before Twilight) certainly testify to that. But the problem with a lot of literature is that, while it's all right to follow in the footsteps of a trailblazer by taking elements from that trailblazer and using it in one's own work, total and utter imitation does not get one very far at all. After all, there are only so many ways one can take the idea of a secret wizarding school without having other readers look at it askance as a Harry Potter ripoff.
These were my fears when I was recommended Lev Grossman's The Magicians by a colleague at the department. It had been about a good year or so since I last finished rereading the series, and I really was rather convinced that no writer could take the wizarding school concept without me thinking of Harry Potter right from the get-go. But the one recommending The Magicians to me also happens to be a notable Harry Potter scholar, and (naturally) a fan, so I thought, well, if she thinks it's not so bad, I suppose I could do worse than read it.
I am now rather glad I took the time to read it, even if I didn't pick it up at the precise moment it was recommended to me. In fact, the delay was a good thing, as it allowed me to cleanse my mind of all possible Harry Potter prejudice and see the novel for what it is. After all, the novel starts in more or less the same way as Harry Potter: Quentin Coldwater has special powers, and he is selected to attend a secret magic school hidden somewhere in upstate New York. There he makes friends, enemies, and meets a villain he must defeat.
Now, when this was recommended to me, I was told that it was a "Harry Potter on vodka and crack," and I will admit that I was rather leery of this. I felt that any attempts to give Harry Potter an "edge" was something better left to fan fiction. Fortunately, Grossman is a good-enough writer that, while it's true that my colleague's comparison point to Rowling's series, with the addition of drugs and alcohol, was appropriate, I think she also referenced, in that one statement, the "realness" of the story.
Now, there is no denying that there is a rather fairytale-ish quality to Harry Potter: I think many readers will admit (some freely) that they have wished they could escape to Hogwarts, escape into this parallel universe because the real world is just too boring or too dangerous or just makes them plain unhappy. In the magical world, the reader might, just as Harry Potter did, find acceptance and purpose. Sure, he nearly gets killed on his first year, and it's certainly no fun having a Dark Lord on one's tail, but those are just the attendant hazards of entering a magical world. Everything else - spellcasting and Quidditch and friends and magic - makes up for it.
In many ways, these same sentiments are mirrored by the main character of The Magicians, Quentin Coldwater.He wishes to escape his mundane, boring, complicated world, initially by desiring to go to the land of Fillory (a land described in a series of Narnia-esque novels he read as a child), and then later on by going to Brakebills (the magic school hidden in upstate New York) and learning magic. For a while, everything seems to go well for him: he learns a lot of magic at the school, and gets rather good at quite a bit of it. He even manages to get himself a girlfriend. But then he realizes that what he has is really actually rather hollow, that he is unhappy with what he has. But a discovery by an old school friend (of a sort) then leads him to his wildest dreams: to enter Fillory, and there go on an adventure like none other.
At this point, the reader expects Quentin and his friends to go a-questing to save Fillory, and they do - just not in the way Lewis or even Tolkien portrayed it. In fact, a lot of what's portrayed in the book, particularly when referenced to Narnia and Harry Potter, just doesn't seem quite right. And that "something wrong" can be summarized in one word: reality.
What Grossman has accomplished here is take all the idealism of the Narnia books and Harry Potter books and rip it out of the fabric of the stories. The magical world, then, is no longer a place where one goes to escape, because it's pretty much like the real world, except maybe far, far more dangerous precisely because it is magical. While there are indeed penalties for doing dark magic or being involved with evil, both in Narnia and Harry Potter, in The Magicians magic is neither good nor bad - it's about how you use it. And sometimes, even when one thinks one uses it for good, it often turns out that, no matter what one's intentions might be, someone, somewhere, suffers for that casting. It's simple physics: action, equal reaction. But since magic is well beyond normal physics, the application of that specific Newtonian law tends to end in strange, dangerous - and often heartbreaking - results.
No wrong deed goes unpunished, and more often than not, no good deed does, either.
Quentin is a classic example of this result. He just wants to go to Fillory and escape his dreary, mundane existence - what could be so wrong with that? Everyone wants to escape.But in doing so, Quentin realizes - too late, unfortunately, for his lady-love, Alice (who sacrifices herself at the end to save him and the rest of their friends) - that he can really never escape himself, and if he's ever going to be truly happy, then he must learn to live with himself. Only then will he be able to find his place in the world - regardless of where that world might be. But his actions before that realization create a large mess of his life. There is some good in it, true, but there's a lot that's bad, too.
If any of this is beginning to sound depressingly familiar, that should come as no surprise. This is what happens when one takes away that veil of idealism over the magical world (whatever it might be: Middle-Earth or Narnia or Hogwarts) and applies the cold, hard eye of reality to it - as it probably should be, anyway. Just because there is magic in a world does not mean that the world will be any happier or less complicated than a world without magic. Likely magic will just complicate matters.
So where does the vodka and crack come in? Well, the characters do seem to consume a lot of it, both within the school and later on outside of it. To be fair, the lush of Quentin's group of friends, Eliot, has very fine tastes and is a bit of a wine connoisseur, but still. The characters are not shown actually using drugs, but the narration says they do so, off-screen, as it were. And this, I think, makes sense, given that the magical school of the novel is more like a university than a high school, with the first-years being around seventeen or so.
While I'm sure all of the above sounds depressing, if not outright objectionable, I will say that they are the primary reasons why I enjoyed the novel in the first place. While I really, truly appreciate the idealism of Rowling and Lewis's works, I also appreciate Grossman's attempt to throw a cold bucket of water into his readers' collective faces - most of whom would have walked into this novel expecting it to have the same idealism as Rowling and Lewis - to remind them that there is such a thing was reality, and while good things, like miracles, happen in reality, a lot more happens that isn't quite so nice, either. It's rather like reading the original Brothers Grimm fairy tales after seeing their Disney versions first: a bit of a shock, but for the right person, a reasonably enjoyable one.
While I found this novel enjoyable enough to read, for the reasons I mentioned above, I do advise caution. The Magicians can be rather depressing because of the absence of idealism (in fact, it's about the destruction of idealism), but if the reader is in the right frame of mind, it's really a rather good read. Just be prepared to look at the world with a cynical eye for a few hours or days; it seems rather unavoidable.
Harry Potter did much to revitalize the reading habit, especially amongst young adults - and as a result, threw wide open the floodgates that would pave the way for things like Twilight and, in essence the enormous industry of young-adult fiction. All of a sudden what was once a tiny section of a bookstore suddenly became a marketing goldmine, and pretty much everybody has cashed in.
They say that imitation is the best form of flattery, and I suppose in some ways the fact that a large number of Harry Potter-type variants that emerged in the few years after it became a huge hit (but before Twilight) certainly testify to that. But the problem with a lot of literature is that, while it's all right to follow in the footsteps of a trailblazer by taking elements from that trailblazer and using it in one's own work, total and utter imitation does not get one very far at all. After all, there are only so many ways one can take the idea of a secret wizarding school without having other readers look at it askance as a Harry Potter ripoff.
These were my fears when I was recommended Lev Grossman's The Magicians by a colleague at the department. It had been about a good year or so since I last finished rereading the series, and I really was rather convinced that no writer could take the wizarding school concept without me thinking of Harry Potter right from the get-go. But the one recommending The Magicians to me also happens to be a notable Harry Potter scholar, and (naturally) a fan, so I thought, well, if she thinks it's not so bad, I suppose I could do worse than read it.
I am now rather glad I took the time to read it, even if I didn't pick it up at the precise moment it was recommended to me. In fact, the delay was a good thing, as it allowed me to cleanse my mind of all possible Harry Potter prejudice and see the novel for what it is. After all, the novel starts in more or less the same way as Harry Potter: Quentin Coldwater has special powers, and he is selected to attend a secret magic school hidden somewhere in upstate New York. There he makes friends, enemies, and meets a villain he must defeat.
Now, when this was recommended to me, I was told that it was a "Harry Potter on vodka and crack," and I will admit that I was rather leery of this. I felt that any attempts to give Harry Potter an "edge" was something better left to fan fiction. Fortunately, Grossman is a good-enough writer that, while it's true that my colleague's comparison point to Rowling's series, with the addition of drugs and alcohol, was appropriate, I think she also referenced, in that one statement, the "realness" of the story.
Now, there is no denying that there is a rather fairytale-ish quality to Harry Potter: I think many readers will admit (some freely) that they have wished they could escape to Hogwarts, escape into this parallel universe because the real world is just too boring or too dangerous or just makes them plain unhappy. In the magical world, the reader might, just as Harry Potter did, find acceptance and purpose. Sure, he nearly gets killed on his first year, and it's certainly no fun having a Dark Lord on one's tail, but those are just the attendant hazards of entering a magical world. Everything else - spellcasting and Quidditch and friends and magic - makes up for it.
In many ways, these same sentiments are mirrored by the main character of The Magicians, Quentin Coldwater.
At this point, the reader expects Quentin and his friends to go a-questing to save Fillory, and they do - just not in the way Lewis or even Tolkien portrayed it. In fact, a lot of what's portrayed in the book, particularly when referenced to Narnia and Harry Potter, just doesn't seem quite right. And that "something wrong" can be summarized in one word: reality.
What Grossman has accomplished here is take all the idealism of the Narnia books and Harry Potter books and rip it out of the fabric of the stories. The magical world, then, is no longer a place where one goes to escape, because it's pretty much like the real world, except maybe far, far more dangerous precisely because it is magical. While there are indeed penalties for doing dark magic or being involved with evil, both in Narnia and Harry Potter, in The Magicians magic is neither good nor bad - it's about how you use it. And sometimes, even when one thinks one uses it for good, it often turns out that, no matter what one's intentions might be, someone, somewhere, suffers for that casting. It's simple physics: action, equal reaction. But since magic is well beyond normal physics, the application of that specific Newtonian law tends to end in strange, dangerous - and often heartbreaking - results.
No wrong deed goes unpunished, and more often than not, no good deed does, either.
Quentin is a classic example of this result. He just wants to go to Fillory and escape his dreary, mundane existence - what could be so wrong with that? Everyone wants to escape.
If any of this is beginning to sound depressingly familiar, that should come as no surprise. This is what happens when one takes away that veil of idealism over the magical world (whatever it might be: Middle-Earth or Narnia or Hogwarts) and applies the cold, hard eye of reality to it - as it probably should be, anyway. Just because there is magic in a world does not mean that the world will be any happier or less complicated than a world without magic. Likely magic will just complicate matters.
So where does the vodka and crack come in? Well, the characters do seem to consume a lot of it, both within the school and later on outside of it. To be fair, the lush of Quentin's group of friends, Eliot, has very fine tastes and is a bit of a wine connoisseur, but still. The characters are not shown actually using drugs, but the narration says they do so, off-screen, as it were. And this, I think, makes sense, given that the magical school of the novel is more like a university than a high school, with the first-years being around seventeen or so.
While I'm sure all of the above sounds depressing, if not outright objectionable, I will say that they are the primary reasons why I enjoyed the novel in the first place. While I really, truly appreciate the idealism of Rowling and Lewis's works, I also appreciate Grossman's attempt to throw a cold bucket of water into his readers' collective faces - most of whom would have walked into this novel expecting it to have the same idealism as Rowling and Lewis - to remind them that there is such a thing was reality, and while good things, like miracles, happen in reality, a lot more happens that isn't quite so nice, either. It's rather like reading the original Brothers Grimm fairy tales after seeing their Disney versions first: a bit of a shock, but for the right person, a reasonably enjoyable one.
While I found this novel enjoyable enough to read, for the reasons I mentioned above, I do advise caution. The Magicians can be rather depressing because of the absence of idealism (in fact, it's about the destruction of idealism), but if the reader is in the right frame of mind, it's really a rather good read. Just be prepared to look at the world with a cynical eye for a few hours or days; it seems rather unavoidable.
From Grossman's interview with Goodreads after this book came out:
Woof.
As someone who still catches themselves, late at night, or alone in a particularly quiet stretch of tree-filled path around Japan—this country is, unsurprisingly, full of things that make you look at them hard for a long time, waiting for something to look back—thinking that, you know, maybe this is where the adventure starts, maybe this is when life becomes as interesting as was promised—well. This book was all but a personal attack. Quentin was far enough removed from me in many ways that I only sometimes found him exasperating and difficult to read. I often felt pity for him, almost maternally, in a way that a) usually doesn't happen for me with novels and b) I don't even feel for real men? I just wanted to bodily hurl him into therapy and make him some nice soup?? I was rarely too frustrated his attitude and behavior because, to me, it so clearly came from a depression and self-loathing I found uncomfortably familiar, particularly at that time of life, particularly for someone who was always considered "special" or "gifted" and found out how little that actually mattered, in the great scheme of things. When he finally toldthe Beast that the worst fate was having to live with yourself, I almost screamed (even if it didn't provoke the great self-realization in him I was hoping for).
In some ways, having a hero like Quentin was like having cold water thrown on myself—I still go through black periods of thinking, life should be brighter and it's not fair that it isn't. The cast was difficult to love, even more difficult to root for, but I think having come from nasty depression and an "I was told I was gifted, so why isn't everything Easy and Good" background, I just wanted them to have their moments of happiness, to find something to cling to, and press on. Reading this was like standing behind someone who's stuck in a mire and pushing them out, uphill, even as they sank all their weight back onto you. I loved it, even as I wanted to ring their necks, but lovingly, like a mother with a sullen teen who has just learned to spot the hypocrisy in "Because I said so."
It shouldn't have worked, really. These characters are sad, angry, petty people, and had the writing not been so light and straightforward, I probably would have given up halfway through. Grossman has a wonderful ear for dry comedy and humorous, piercing observations that simultaneously elevates his characters above ~the plebes~ and utterly punctures the self-important identities they have constructed for themselves. The way he gently skewers Quentin (and everyone else, except perhaps Alice) kept his self-loathing and holier-than-thou attitude, from being anything but eye-rollingly in-character. There wasn't even a whiff of narrative support for his Nice Guy-ness, and I couldn't have been happier. Quentin and everyone else were big dumb idiots and the book leaned hard, maybe too hard, into that. Thank god.
I could have done with less drunken binges, even as I recognized them as that combination of early-20s partying and self-medicating, and boy, did the first part of this book plod along. I was deeply interested in Brakebills, but the book raced through five (four?) years, and yet, as it took up the first 60% of the novel, it seemed achingly slow at times. I knew this whole Fillory thing was coming, and wanted it to get there. Maybe that was the point. I suppose I can't fault it for that.
"I think everybody feels a bit out of place in life—like they've been slightly miscast or incorrectly routed. We're wired to expect the world to be brighter and more meaningful and more obviously interesting than it actually is. And when we realize that it isn't, we start looking around for the real world."
Woof.
As someone who still catches themselves, late at night, or alone in a particularly quiet stretch of tree-filled path around Japan—this country is, unsurprisingly, full of things that make you look at them hard for a long time, waiting for something to look back—thinking that, you know, maybe this is where the adventure starts, maybe this is when life becomes as interesting as was promised—well. This book was all but a personal attack. Quentin was far enough removed from me in many ways that I only sometimes found him exasperating and difficult to read. I often felt pity for him, almost maternally, in a way that a) usually doesn't happen for me with novels and b) I don't even feel for real men? I just wanted to bodily hurl him into therapy and make him some nice soup?? I was rarely too frustrated his attitude and behavior because, to me, it so clearly came from a depression and self-loathing I found uncomfortably familiar, particularly at that time of life, particularly for someone who was always considered "special" or "gifted" and found out how little that actually mattered, in the great scheme of things. When he finally told
In some ways, having a hero like Quentin was like having cold water thrown on myself—I still go through black periods of thinking, life should be brighter and it's not fair that it isn't. The cast was difficult to love, even more difficult to root for, but I think having come from nasty depression and an "I was told I was gifted, so why isn't everything Easy and Good" background, I just wanted them to have their moments of happiness, to find something to cling to, and press on. Reading this was like standing behind someone who's stuck in a mire and pushing them out, uphill, even as they sank all their weight back onto you. I loved it, even as I wanted to ring their necks, but lovingly, like a mother with a sullen teen who has just learned to spot the hypocrisy in "Because I said so."
It shouldn't have worked, really. These characters are sad, angry, petty people, and had the writing not been so light and straightforward, I probably would have given up halfway through. Grossman has a wonderful ear for dry comedy and humorous, piercing observations that simultaneously elevates his characters above ~the plebes~ and utterly punctures the self-important identities they have constructed for themselves. The way he gently skewers Quentin (and everyone else, except perhaps Alice) kept his self-loathing and holier-than-thou attitude, from being anything but eye-rollingly in-character. There wasn't even a whiff of narrative support for his Nice Guy-ness, and I couldn't have been happier. Quentin and everyone else were big dumb idiots and the book leaned hard, maybe too hard, into that. Thank god.
I could have done with less drunken binges, even as I recognized them as that combination of early-20s partying and self-medicating, and boy, did the first part of this book plod along. I was deeply interested in Brakebills, but the book raced through five (four?) years, and yet, as it took up the first 60% of the novel, it seemed achingly slow at times. I knew this whole Fillory thing was coming, and wanted it to get there. Maybe that was the point. I suppose I can't fault it for that.
This book was awesome! I don't understand why so many people hate this book so much...yes it was slow to start and there were some slow parts throughout but I thought it was great and I really kind of enjoy that the characters are mostly all assholes, it's kind of refreshing.Can't wait to see what happens in the second novel.