The Magicians - Part 1

The Magicians

by Lev Grossman

The binding is the bee-and-key symbol from the book, but I have entirely no idea why this is the front cover yet. Now that I've really looked at it, it looks kind of pretentious, really. But the book itself isn't pretentious, so don't let the cover fool you.

Purchased from Amazon here. A good friend bought this for me for Christmas after I'd heard him rave about it over and over again.

This is part one of my review of The Magicians because I just hit page 134 after a particularly busy holiday week -- which for those of you who have the book is the start of the chapter Marie Byrd Lane, which I believe is chapter 7.  I'm going to start giving a layout to my reviews. I'll always start out with a link to buy the book (if I can find one; I'm not totally ure it will be possible with some of the old/crazy ones). What follows that will be a synopsis (spoiler warning). And following that I will give my recommendation on whether or not to purchase it.

Since I haven't read the whole book, I'll give my synopsis up to this point, as well as my recommendation up to this point, with a note that the latter may change. I have 268 pages left to read after all--about two-thirds of the book.

Synopsis: So, so far in our story:

We have our protagonist, Quentin Coldwater. A gangly sullen boy, incredibly intelligent. He sets out with his friends (Julia, who he has a crush on, and James, who is his best friend, dating Julia, and one of those people you desperately want to hate because he's attractive and smart and great at sports but you just can't because he's too nice) to get interviewed for Princeton. All that goes wrong when his interviewer is dead.

Instead he finds a pretty paramedic lady (who better come back because I fucking love her -- I mean, people have looked weirded out about her and she was in the healing ward but look, I'm ahead of myself) who hands him some weird papers which seem to be an acceptance letter to some weird school. The letter gets caught in the wind, Quentin dashes after it--and ends up emerging from some hedges on to the lawn of Brakebills College of Magic.

After taking some entrance exams, Quentin gets into the school. After that point, it's a hodge podge of things going on that I haven't quite seen how they're connected yet, but lets see what I can remember:

• Quentin learning that magic is a lot more tedious and less natural than he'd always dreamed it was.
• Quentin becoming friends with Alice, a shy quiet girl who wasn't initially accepted at Brakebills.
• A whole chapter devoted to some game called welters that is sort of like wizard chess involving claiming squares or something but I admit that chapter interested me least and I sort of zoned out through it.
• Quentin getting nudged ahead by a year, along with Alice.
• Quentin becoming a member of the Physicals, which is a discipline within magic that they learn better. Or, well, Quentin doesn't really but is put in with them at the moment because they have the fewest students and he has to go somewhere.
• Quentin plays a prank on one of his professors, and in the process, some magic goes incredibly wrong, summoning The Beast from another plane. The Beast resembles a human, with no discernible face and more fingers than he should have.  The Beast makes time stand still, mostly wanders around like he barely notices them. There's a girl -- Amanda -- who tries to stop it, but in the process draws the Beast's attention so that it devours her. Quentin blames himself for summoning the Beast, and is too terrified of mentioning it to anyone to actually get it off his chest.

 There's also the undercurrent of Quentin's favorite book series, the Fillory books which closely resemble The Chronicles of Narnia. In them, four kids travel this this magical realm of Fillory, exciting things happen, there's the evil Watcherwitch who isn't really all that evil and just does weird things in the background. The children in the book have to destroy clocks or deal with clocks a lot.

I get the severe feeling that The Beast is connected in some way to Fillory because of this last bit. There's not that much time spent on it, but one of the few things the Beast does as he dances around and sings and acts strange is, when he spots a clock on the wall, he presses his hand to it and smashes it slowly but surely. Which--y'know, ties into that.

Also, I swear if I took every sentence/paragraph/etc of Quentin thinking about breasts in this book, I'd have a small chapter. Or of him thinking about how attractive girls are, maybe a large chapter. To be fair, he's an 18/19 year old boy so far, so that shit makes sense, but dear god, I had to put the book down for two hours at one point when someone's chest was described a deliciously gropeable and my eyes nearly rolled out of my head. I expect that shit in a romance book (I would just laugh and keep reading were the words "deliciously gropeable" in a romance book, because I'm sure they have been before), but I didn't in this and it just made me want to smack my face into a wall.

Should you read it? So far, aside from the boobs thing, I'm loving this book. A lot. To the point I want to buy a hard back copy to put on my bookshelf instead of the paperback that I currently have. So, tentatively, with only 1/3rd of the book read: Read the hell out of this book. It's great. I'll update you more next week.