The Magicians

June 1, 2009
Harry Potter discovers Narnia is real in this derivative fantasy thriller from Time
book critic Grossman (Codex
). Quentin Coldwater, a Brooklyn high school student devoted to a children’s series set in the Narnia-like world of Fillory, is leading an aimless existence until he’s tapped to enter a mysterious portal that leads to Brakebills College, an exclusive academy where he’s taught magic. Coldwater, whose special gifts enable him to skip grades, finds his family’s world “mundane and domestic” when he returns home for vacation. He loses his innocence after a prank unintentionally allows a powerful evil force known only as the Beast to enter the college and wreak havoc. Eventually, Coldwater’s powers are put to the test when he learns that Fillory is a real place and how he can journey there. Genre fans will easily pick up the many nods to J.K. Rowling and C.S. Lewis, not to mention J.R.R. Tolkien in the climactic battle between the bad guy and a magician. 5-city author tour.

September 28, 2009
Grossman's novel is a postadolescent Harry Potter
, following apprentices in the art of magic through their time as students at an upstate New York college to their postcollegiate Manhattan misdeeds, with jaded ennui tempering the magical aura. Mark Bramhall, a smooth baritone with a supple speaking voice, reads carefully, with a slight air of heaviness and sorrow. He pauses frequently and freights the silences with a tenderness well befitting a coming-of-age novel. A Viking hardcover (Reviews, June 1).

May 1, 2009
Grossman (Codex, 2004, etc.) imagines a sorcery school whose primary lesson seems to be that bending the world to your will isn't all it's cracked up to be.

When Quentin manages to find Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy and pass its baffling entrance exam, he finally feels at home somewhere. Back in the real world, Quentin and fellow students, like brilliant, crippling shy Alice and debonair, sexually twisted Eliot, were misfits, obsessed with a famous children's series called Fillory and Further (The Chronicles of Narnia, very lightly disguised). Brakebills teaches them how to tap into the universe's flow of energy to cast spells; they're ready to graduate and…then what?"You can do nothing or anything or everything," cautions Alice, who has become Quentin's lover."You have to find something to really care about to keep from running totally off the rails." Her warning seems apt as he indulges in aimless post-grad drinking and partying, eventually betraying Alice with two other Brakebills alums. The discovery that Fillory actually exists offers Quentin a chance to redeem himself with Alice and find a purpose for his life as well. But Fillory turns out to be an even more dangerous, anarchic place than the books suggested, and it harbors a Beast who's already made a catastrophic appearance at Brakebills. The novel's climax includes some spectacular magical battles to complement the complex emotional entanglements Grossman has deftly sketched in earlier chapters. The bottom line has nothing to do with magic at all:"There's no getting away from yourself," Quentin realizes. After a dreadful loss that he discovers is the result of manipulation by forces that care nothing about him or his friends, Quentin chooses a bleak, circumscribed existence in the nonmagical world. Three of his Brakebills pals return to invite him back to Fillory: Does this promise new hope, or threaten more delusions?

Very dark and very scary, with no simple answers provided—fantasy for grown-ups, in other words, and very satisfying indeed.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

Starred review from May 1, 2009
Most of us secretly believed as children that we were somehow destined for greatness. Someday there would be a letter delivered by owl or a magical wardrobe, and it would turn out we were the long-lost ruler of a land in eternal winter! "Time" magazine book critic Grossman ("The Codex") explores what it might be like if this really happened. High school senior Quentin is on his way to a college interview when he wanders off the street and ends up transported to another place]where it's still summer. At first he thinks he must be in the land of Fillory, where his favorite childhood books took place, but no, he is actually at a magical college in upstate New York. He passes the entrance exam and decides to skip the rest of senior year and become a wizard insteadwell, wouldn't you? In the course of his adventures, he finds out that studying magic is actually insanely difficult and that fighting a war for the royal succession of an alternate world is much less glamorous than it sounds. But this is not quite a "be careful what you wish for" story. Ultimately, being a magician is, in fact, awesome. This is a book for grown-up fans of children's fantasy and would also appeal to those who loved Donna Tartt's "The Secret History". Highly recommended.

Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from May 15, 2009
This literary fantasy, drawing heavily from the fantasy canon but unique in its reworking ofit, can be seen as a sort of darker, modern-day response to the magic-in-the-real-world of Susanna Clarkes Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (2004). When Quentin, a brooding and insecure teenager gifted with sleight of hand, is invited to enroll in a university for young spellcasters, he is thrilled beyond words. He grew up fervently rereading a series of fantasy books in which a group of children pass from this world to the magical realm of Fillory (read: Narnia), but it turns out the pursuit of magic is just about as boring as studying anything else. At school and in New York City after graduation, Quentins life seesaws between the mind-numbingly dull application of rote spellcasting and the typical twentysomething pursuit of booze, sex, and repeat. Until, that is, he and his friends figure out that Fillory is real. Grossman sometimes gets bogged down in the minutiae of explaining how practicing magic is tedious, which itself gets awfully tedious. But when the friends endeavor to go on a heroic quest, the matter-of-fact fashion in which their fantastical adventure transforms into a nightmare is as absurdly sobering for the reader as it is for Quentin. Deep fantasy fans cant afford to miss the darkly comic and unforgettably queasy experience of reading this bookand be glad for reality.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)