A review by rainylavender
The Magicians by Lev Grossman

dark sad tense slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.25

When reading the Magicians, I thought I would be the target audience of this book as someone who loves fantasy and has depression. A good chunk of my criticism comes from me not being the target audience of this book. You know how at the end of certain kids movies and stories about magic, the kid loses the ability to see/experience magic at the end when they grow up? I've always hated that. I thought that magic is something that adults should get to experience too and you shouldn't grow out of that whimsy and fun. This book is like the adult version of that.
Quentin gets everything he wants and still he can't enjoy it. I get that's what depression is, trust me, I do. But I thought maybe he'd overcome it instead of following that theme the entire book. The book seems to end with him having decided magic is bad, but then in the last second Janet, Eliot, and Julia all show up to whisk him back to Fillory, so what was the point of everything? I'm sure this is just the preamble to a moral told by the other two books, but this book beat the horse so hard I don't have any desire to keep reading. The twists of them being manipulated by the Beast and killing all the good people while working for the bad people felt contrived to me, just done for shock value to really lay in that this is a "dark" and "not like other fantasies" fantasy but I also saw it coming a mile away because of how overdone that trope is. I also get that the point of Alice is that Quentin isn't supposed to realize how good he has it till she gone but I can't stand the way he treats her the entire book and her turning into a niffin at the end just felt like a cheap way to give Quentin character development that should've happened ages ago. And I can't stand Quentin. I can't stand his attitude, his faulty logic, and his sexism. I get that these are all traits to feed the moral and plot but it goes on for so long with very minimal change to the point where I'm just exhausted.
This book left me tired. The worst part is, I expected to love it. 
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