ringmasterow 's review for:

The Magicians by Lev Grossman

3.0

---

I started this book again with the intent to complete it this time. It's strange how sometimes books feel like a bunch of parts from other books smashed together. This one is like Narnia meets Hogwarts meets every angsty young adult book character. Quentin, the main character, is thoroughly unlikable. Part of what seemed to impress other readers of this book is that the characters do "realistic" stupid things. I'm not sure I appreciated being frustrated by their poor choices throughout the book. The book plods on in the middle, with events that occur being rathet irrelevant to anything that happens in the future. You could easily yank out whole chapters and not miss anything but flavor. The end included a tedious fight between the main characters and the "bad guy", whose badness really had no great background explanation. And the cliffhanger ending was a pretty lousy way to end this book. The writing was great - very descriptive and imaginative - but I expected much more from the plot.