Author: Lev Grossman
Dates read: January 6, 2010 - January 16, 2010 (11 days)
Pages: 402
A horrendous cold has felled me for longer than I’d like to admit, but even with that slowing me down, I still finished this book ahead of schedule. The cover of this novel caught my eye in November and a friend told me it was supposed to be fantastic, but this was another book that I made myself wait to get until after the holidays. Back from my Christmas trip and gift cards in hand, I had to go to several book stores before I was able to find a copy due to how well it sold for the holidays!
This novel follows a seventeen year old boy named Quentin as he’s plucked from Brooklyn and admitted to a college for magicians in upstate New York called Brakebills. While it may sound a bit like Harry Potter, Quentin’s five year matriculation at Brakebills and subsequent post-graduate malaise are nothing like the famous wizarding books for children. This novel is dark, an imagining of what magic education and practice would be like in the real world: organic, complicated beyond belief, and dangerous. Quentin himself often despairs at the reality of magic and its lack of similarity to a series of beloved fantasy books from his childhood, all set in a land called Fillory that is very Narnia-esque and benign. But the deeper Quentin gets into the reality of magic in his world, the more he wants Fillory to be real, which is perhaps not as impossible as he thought as a child.
This book is fantastic. It manages to weave magic into a real world setting without making magic the focus of the entire story. It feels authentic, and the characters and their relationships are at the heart of everything rather than being surface elements to an adventure bigger than they are. The book doesn’t pull punches, and the emotional ramifications of every character’s actions are of as much consequence as, if not more than, the physical and magical ones. My only objection came at the last few pages of the novel, when things felt coincidental in the conclusion. But it’s the only time in the whole book where something feels contrived, and given how far into dark territory the book goes, I understand (but still object to) the point of light Grossman places at the very end. All in all though, I would still highly recommend this book. It’s a page turner that is very difficult to put down.
