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A review by fuchsiarascal
The Magicians by Lev Grossman
adventurous
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
2.0
Good lord, I finally finished it and am so happy about that. Listen, it's not often that you get to say the TV show is better than the book (especially if the book came first), but this is an exception. Reading it just made me miss the show and all the actual character development and fun in it... so I got the DVDs from the library while I sludged through this. And it's a shame, because I really had high hopes for this, being a huge fan of the show.
So, let's be honest, the book absolutely reads like a self-insert fanfic of Harry Potter and Chronicles of Narnia... but in the most insufferable way. All the focus is on Quentin (in the show, the focus gets split between characters pretty evenly), and he's just... a terrible person. Not necessarily morally terrible, just terrible to be around. And, listen, I'm a big fan of characters who start out insufferable and you eventually come around to (see: almost all of the Graceling series main characters), but he never has any growth, he never sees his own faults or thinks, "Hmm, maybe I'm the problem." And he just gets away with it!He sleeps with Janet, then Alice sleeps with Penny after they break up, and *she's* the bad guy? And then she goes to Fillory "to protect and save him" (her words!) to... win him back? Definitely a guy's wet dream fanfic.
And, sure, you can have a main character who's disillusioned and pretentious and insufferable, and the point of the story can be that "magic doesn't fix things", but... Lev Grossman does absolutely nothing clever or even interesting with this premise. It's just suffering on top of suffering. When I read that he attended Yale and Harvard, it all made sense: this is genre fiction that aims to be "higher brow" than your standard fare of genre fiction, because Grossman had a boner for HP but it's too "common", but The Magicians lacks all the charm of what makes fantasy good.
In list format, this book has so many things that should be great. Give me chronically depressed characters! Spin the expectation that magic makes everything better (although many fantasy fans would already know this isn't the case)! Give me real problems mixed with fantasy! But Grossman seems to miss the point with all of this, with why people enjoy fantasy. It's not because of the magic. To quote Coraline from Neil Gaiman: “Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.” (Just replace fairy tales with fantasy; I promise it still works.) Fine, they beat the big bad with magic, but they're still miserable sacks of shit. Where's the satisfaction? Oh, right, because they need therapy and self-reflection, which is sorely missing from this book.
To be clear, I didn't hate this book with the intensity of a thousand suns (that would be a one star rating); it was just boring and had no charm. I don't want to read the other two in the series because this was so bad, but I probably will because I have a perverse need to see how it goes (I really can't leave series unfinished, it's a curse!) and how it differs from the show.
I switched back and forth between audiobook and printed versions for this; the audiobook narrator was decent but probably would've been more enjoyable if I had enjoyed the text 😅
So, let's be honest, the book absolutely reads like a self-insert fanfic of Harry Potter and Chronicles of Narnia... but in the most insufferable way. All the focus is on Quentin (in the show, the focus gets split between characters pretty evenly), and he's just... a terrible person. Not necessarily morally terrible, just terrible to be around. And, listen, I'm a big fan of characters who start out insufferable and you eventually come around to (see: almost all of the Graceling series main characters), but he never has any growth, he never sees his own faults or thinks, "Hmm, maybe I'm the problem." And he just gets away with it!
And, sure, you can have a main character who's disillusioned and pretentious and insufferable, and the point of the story can be that "magic doesn't fix things", but... Lev Grossman does absolutely nothing clever or even interesting with this premise. It's just suffering on top of suffering. When I read that he attended Yale and Harvard, it all made sense: this is genre fiction that aims to be "higher brow" than your standard fare of genre fiction, because Grossman had a boner for HP but it's too "common", but The Magicians lacks all the charm of what makes fantasy good.
In list format, this book has so many things that should be great. Give me chronically depressed characters! Spin the expectation that magic makes everything better (although many fantasy fans would already know this isn't the case)! Give me real problems mixed with fantasy! But Grossman seems to miss the point with all of this, with why people enjoy fantasy. It's not because of the magic. To quote Coraline from Neil Gaiman: “Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.” (Just replace fairy tales with fantasy; I promise it still works.) Fine, they beat the big bad with magic, but they're still miserable sacks of shit. Where's the satisfaction? Oh, right, because they need therapy and self-reflection, which is sorely missing from this book.
To be clear, I didn't hate this book with the intensity of a thousand suns (that would be a one star rating); it was just boring and had no charm. I don't want to read the other two in the series because this was so bad, but I probably will because I have a perverse need to see how it goes (I really can't leave series unfinished, it's a curse!) and how it differs from the show.
I switched back and forth between audiobook and printed versions for this; the audiobook narrator was decent but probably would've been more enjoyable if I had enjoyed the text 😅