Laura's Reviews > The Magicians

So let's get the horrible marketing out of the way first. First of all, for those of you who may be under the same misunderstanding as the good folks at Audible.com let me say this: The Magicians is not a children's book. I really think I should say it again, in bold this time: The Magicians is not a children's book. The cheery introduction by chanting 9 year olds that begins each section of the audible.com download ("This is audible kids!") makes as much sense as it would before an episode of HBOs The Sopranos. Violence, sex, alcohol, drugs, cruelty, depression... The Magicians has it all and more. No, it is
definitely not a children's book. OK? Everyone got that? As a reader, I am extremely annoyed by bad marketing ploys like this one, since the issue of whether "The Magicians" is a good book should be considered apart from any child-appropriateness it may or may not possess, which is impossible if readers have been misled into believing they are downloading Harry Potter II: Harry Goes to Fillory for a nice family car ride.

OK, on to the book itself. To be honest, before I read one of the interviews with the author, I couldn't be certain whether Grossman was paying homage to, or writing a satire of, a great many popular fantasy stories, including The Chronicles Of Narnia, The LOTR, Harry Potter, and even Star Wars. Was he twisting popular children's fantasy stories
into something completely "other" in order to show us how silly they were to begin with? Or, alternately, how applicable they still are to adult readers? The nature of his story lends itself to either interpretation.

Grossman may be following in some of the footsteps of C.S. Lewis and J.K. Rowling, but he also forges his own trail which can stand or fall on its own merits. Grossman has imagination to spare and the details of his magical worlds are original and enjoyable, but in my opinion the book falls, not because of the twist he has given to popular children's fantasy icons, but because his protagonist, Quentin Coldwater, is so unrelentingly annoying. We first meet Quentin at the age of seventeen, as an upper-middle-class American kid on his way to a Princeton admission interview. In very short time we become acquainted with his most obvious personal characteristics: self-pity, self-absorption, and
a sense of entitlement. Now, it may very well be that those are the most obvious personal characteristics of the majority of American upper-middle-class teenagers at the age of seventeen, but that doesn't make them any less annoying to read about by those of us who are not said upper-class American teenagers. They would be annoying in real life, and they are just as - if not more - annoying in print, simply because the reader has no escape from the inside of Quentin's head. We begin the book wondering why he dislikes himself so much and end it by wondering why anyone else likes him at all. Nothing satisfies his feeling that life - his life - should be better than it is: more exciting, more fulfilling, more fair. Not admission to a secret, magical college; not acceptance by what is basically a secret magical co-ed fraternity; not passing an excruciating test - failed by
most of his classmates - that makes him one of the few "true" magicians. Certainly not graduating and moving to Manhattan where he has unlimited funds to live on for an entire year and no real money worries after that. No, not even finally entering a magic kingdom and, eventually, not even finding his way home again. In fact, Quentin is at his most annoying after he has gone through his personal "redemption quest" in Fillory and returned to "the real world", where he lives a life that 99.9% of the human race can only dream about. Yet he still sulks. He self-flagellates. He beats his chest and cries "Woe! Woe is me!". It gets old.

I am willing to admit that I may dislike Quentin because he embodies that part in all of us that - especially as teenagers and young adults - believes we were meant for "better things" and that the lives our parents live couldn't possibly be enough for us. However at some point, most of us face the fact that we are human beings, pretty much just like those around us, and the universe doesn't owe us glory and success. Quentin doesn't. None of the adventures or trauma that he goes through during the course of the book changes his sense of self-pity one iota. In the end of the book, he is the same person he was at the beginning, just older. And that is what makes "The Magicians" so depressing. In the end, Quentin is Peter Pan in Manhattan, with all the trappings of an adult life and the stunted feelings of a spoiled teen. And someone should get this Peter Pan on anti-depressants, stat.