REview: The Magicians, Lev Grossman

The Magicians by Lev Grossman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book is interesting, because it could have been awesome. Don't get me wrong, it's a good book, but I can't help thinking that if only the author had taken another turn somewhere, it would be a more poignant meditation on the dangers of growing up and imaginary worlds. As it is, it was great up to the third part, in which it kind of jumps the shark, and when the character is given a way out of the madness he's in, and it seems he has gotten over his childhood fantasy worldview which has brought him only despair, the author makes him forget all of that and jump right in the fray again. Which kinda undermines all the character work he did before. I haven't read the sequel yet, but it seems the author did a disservice to his own work by trying to turn it into a saga, and thus robbing this book of the emotional resonance it could have had. I would rather he had turned this into the best novel it could be, instead of a good novel that sets up even more stuff.

Also, the whole Fillory-as-Narnia is so overdone that it's kinda ridiculous. The magic element is played more or less straight for most of the book, and then WHAM! off to fairy-tale land we go. It doesn't work seamlessly.

All in all, I wish we had gotten to see more of Quentin's life as an adult magician out and about in the world, or taken a different direction at the end. There seemed to be a lot of story to mine from the setting the author created, so running off to Fillory seemed a waste of a good groundwork.

I'll go ahead and read the sequel and see if my opinion is tempered by a new perspective on the saga. Don't get me wrong, this is a good book and you should read it if you like fantasy, but it could have been a great literary work and not just "book 1" in what appears to be an attempt at a "Harry Potter for grownups".

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