The Magicians
by Lev Grossman
Rating: 4.0 / 5 · Read · Finished 2019-07-14
It’s a book for people who did well in school: “The room filled with a collective rustling of paper, like a flock of birds taking off. Heads bowed in unison. Quentin recognized this motion. It was the motion of a bunch of high powered type-A test killers getting down to their bloody work. That was alright. He was one of them.”
It’s a book that values creativity: “He leaned forward and blew lightly on the card house, and it collapsed back down into a neatly stacked deck. He turned the deck over and fanned it out on the table like a black-jack dealer. Every card was a Queen - all the standard suits, plus other suits that didn’t exist, in different colors, green and yellow and blue. The Queen of Horns, the Queen of Clocks, the Queen of Bees, the Queen of Books.”
It’s a book about struggling to find purpose: “You don’t have to wear toga. That’s exactly the problem, Q. You don’t have to do anything. This is what you don’t understand! You don’t know any older magicians except our professors. It’s a wasteland out there. Out here. You can do nothing or anything or everything, and none of it matters. Yo have to find something to really care about to keep from running totally off the rials. A lot of magicians never find it.”
It’s also got lots of in-jokes for people familiar with Harry Potter and The Chronicles of Narnia.
The pacing is really weird (simultaneously too fast and too slow) and Quentin’s character arc seems to meander all over the place. But since this is a book about making fantasy realistic, maybe that’s on purpose? Because real life doesn’t follow a simple narrative arc?