The Magicians by Lev Grossman

Narrated by Mark Bramhall

This book was strongly recommended to me by someone who knows my taste in literature pretty well and called it “Harry Potter for grownups.”

The comparison is obvious, and fairly apt. Our hero, a kid who is about to graduate from high school in modern-day Brooklyn, discovers and is accepted at Brakebills, a highly exclusive school for magicians—real-magic magicians, that is, not stage magic. It’s a college in upstate New York, not an English boarding school for middle- and high-schoolers, though. And since the students are all college-aged, they do all the stuff you expect college students to do. In addition to learning to manipulate the fabric of reality, that is.

The novel spends a *lot* of time on Quentin’s college years—all five of them—before getting to what I feel is the meat of the story. Don’t get me wrong, Grossman’s take on how magic works is interesting, and his descriptions of various events in Quentin’s school years—especially the episode of the wild geese—can be enthralling. And it certainly gets the reader invested in the central characters, who are definitely three-dimensional. But I kept waiting for the other thing that was described on the book jacket to happen: his discovery that a land from his favorite fantasy series actually exists, and his travels there.

Grossman drops a hint about the magical land of Fillory (a very thinly-veiled analog of Narnia, with a smidgen of Middle Earth thrown in) in the first chapter—then drops the subject completely until well into the second half of the book. Eventually, however, and well after graduation, Quentin and his former classmates do learn that it really exists and that they can really travel there. Travel they do—and, naturally enough, disaster ensues, which, naturally, brings out both the best and the worst in them. Though, again, it takes much longer than I would have expected for things to go truly wrong.

The characters are interesting—even Quentin, who starts out very callow and manages to remain more or less incapable of seeing other people’s point of view throughout the book, gains depth and becomes a protagonist one can root for. The universe the Brakebills students live in is one that I could wish to live in. This a good book and I recommend it. Be prepared, though, for the pacing to be rather… odd. I understand there’s a TV series based on the series of books now; I plan to check it out.