My Personal Review of Lev Grossman's The Magicians

Allow me to preface this review by telling you the reason I chose to read it in the first place. If you’re here, you probably know that I’m working on writing my first full-length novel intended for publication. My book is about witches and Magic, and I have found that Magic-building is a fairly difficult thing to do. Theoretically, you can do anything you want to with magic, like in Harry Potter. You just memorize some enchantments, wave your wand, and presto! Magic. But I’ve found that having some rules for magic has thickened the plot in places. Plus it just makes more sense. There are rules as to what we can and cannot physically do in real life. Why would magic not be the same way?

So, I did a Google search for “books with good magic systems.” I wanted to really get my head in a magical world - preferably a few of them - to help inspire me when building my own Magical world. Google turned up several lists. The Magicians was near the top of each of them, right up there with Harry Potter. Obviously I’ve already read Harry Potter, multiple times. The Magicians was new to me. (I know, I know; have I been living under a rock?)

I looked up from my tablet and said to my husband, “Have you heard of The Magicians by Lev Grossman?” He gave me a funny look and gestured to his personal bookshelf. “I had to read it my creative writing class with Michael Knight. It was awful. You don’t remember me complaining about it every day?”

Once he mentioned it, I could recall him reading the book and repeatedly saying he could not comprehend why Professor Knight and his classmates were so fond of it. So, in all fairness, I may have been more critical of this book than I would have been of other books, simply because my husband had already planted the “this book is awful” seed in my head before I’d even opened it.

Another reason I feel I may be a bit more critical than the average reader is that I’m also an aspiring author. It’s a lot like how I felt about going out to eat after I worked as a server, or having my blood drawn after I’d gone to school and worked as a phlebotomist. When I see things in a published book of The Magicians popularity that my editor has chastised me for, or glaringly obvious contradictions that really should not have slipped through the cracks, red lights go off in my brain. Obviously I know that a good story will carry a book past many, many mistakes, but...well, we’ll get to that in a minute.

Please, please don’t kill me for this review!

Overall rating: Three stars out of five. General summary of thoughts: The book moved slowly, was filled with errors, had an array of terribly unlikable characters, and was sexist throughout. It was a decent story overall, but the plot twist felt obvious to me. Also, I never read The Chronicles of Narnia, and I still know that 90% of this book was based off of it.

Now let’s get into the spoilers. In case you’re skimming…

SPOILER ALERT! SPOILER ALERT! SPOILER ALERT! SPOILER ALERT!

1. The book moved slowly. It almost feels counterintuitive to say that, because the main character goes from normal high school senior to graduating from a school for Magicians (a total of four years’ time for him) in 221 pages. (This is in my copy of the book, which is 402 pages long.) Bear in mind that pages 1 and 2 just say “BOOK 1” so really he did all that in 219 pages. But, when you consider that nothing terribly exciting happened in those 219 pages, and it was almost entirely Magic-building and conflicts created because of the characters’ excessive social awkwardness, it feels like it’s moving slowly. It was hard to stay motivated to finish the whole thing, personally.

2. The book was filled with errors. When I say filled, I mean filled. I’m not going to re-read it to pinpoint them all, but on page 16 Quentin meets a kid named Eliot. The book says Eliot was “leaning against a tree, smoking a cigarette and watching him....He didn’t look at Quentin.” How is he watching Quentin without looking at him? On page 80 Quentin and his friends Surendra and Gretchen are taking a walk and a paragraph says, “Gretchen raised her eyebrows and leered. His nose was red from having been out in the cold.” Gretchen is a girl, so “his” makes no sense. Even if Grossman were referring to someone else when he said “his nose,” he should have specified, since both Quentin and Surendra are boys. I also spotted “an another,” “the the,” and as the group prepares at the end of the book to enter Fillory, Grossman can’t seem to decide if he has 7 or 8 characters in his group. (It was 8, but he repeatedly had characters say ‘There are 7 of us.’)

3. The book has an array of terribly unlikable characters. In The Magicians, people have to be exceptionally smart to be able to perform magic, so nearly all of the characters (except for very minor characters like Quentin’s parents) are extremely intelligent. That’s no excuse for how socially awkward and confused and miserable every single one of them are. I’ve known a lot of really intelligent people, and almost all of them were capable of functioning in the world. Most of them were even popular kids at my high school. I’ll focus on Quentin Coldwater, since he’s the main character. He’s this weird, angsty combination of aggressively hating himself and aggressively thinking he’s better than everyone else. When he becomes a magician, he looks down on people who can’t do magic. When he graduates and is spending his days drinking and doing drugs and doing nothing with his life, he looks down on Alice, his own girlfriend, for being studious and continuing to improve her magic. When Alice dies and he leaves Fillory and gets a job (if you can call it that) and decides to stop using magic completely, he looks down on other magicians for wasting their time with magic. Then he changes his mind and goes back to Fillory. No matter what decisions he’s making, he considers himself superior to everyone making different decisions. He’s also obnoxiously sexist. He describes literally every female character by their breasts and their curves. He regularly underestimates Alice in spite of her proving that she’s a stronger magician than he is at every single turn. On page 11 he’s having a conversation with a woman far above his status in life (at the time he’s a 17-year-old kid and he believes her to be a paramedic) and he thinks, “Unpretty women were so much easier to deal with in some ways - you didn’t have to face the pain of their probable unattainability.” He eventually befriends and, obviously, begins to date a girl named Alice, who is a far more powerful magician than he is. After graduation, he starts to treat her like shit. On page 235 he admires how ravishing their friend Janet looks in her red dress, and thinks, “The kind of thing Alice would never wear. Couldn’t, not with her figure.” Later that same night he cheats on Alice with Janet, and she finds out, drags him to the Neitherlands, and punches him in the face. When they go back to the regular world, she refuses to speak to him or see him for about a week. Quentin blames Janet (who, obviously, is not innocent in the matter, as she knew Quentin and Alice were dating and continues to make lewd gestures at Quentin for days after their romp in the hay) but he never really blames himself. After several days he goes and tries to talk to Alice, and catches her having sex with another guy. He spends the next 60 pages berating her and picking fights with everyone while she does or says absolutely nothing to defend herself, until they finally get in a shouting match in front of everyone where he throws her having sex with the other guy in her face repeatedly but she never once brings up that he was the one who cheated, but she calls him out on how miserable he is all the time and how he’s the only one ruining his entire life. The fight ends with, “He didn’t want to be cold...He slid down the stone bench to her end and kissed her and bit her lower lip until she gasped.”

4. The sexism. Oh, the rank sexism. You can’t even make the argument that the book was only sexist because that was part of Quentin Coldwater’s character. First, with the female characters, you have the usual tropes: the love interest he can’t get who later comes back once he’s powerful, only for him to now reject her (Julia); the homewrecker (Janet); the Hermione character who is far more powerful and capable than the male main character but still exists solely to help him (Alice); the lesbian badass fighter who dies before the climax (Fen). Secondly, the climax of the story was literally resolved by the girlfriend of the male main character sacrificing herself to save his life. Earlier in the story when he asked her why she’d come if she didn’t even want to be there, she literally tells him that she only came along so that she could take care of him and make sure he was safe. When Alice was kicking the bad guy’s ass, I actually thought the book might redeem itself a bit by having the most powerful magician save the day. Then she was only able to beat The Beast by channeling all of the anger and hurt Quentin had caused her, thereby messing up her spell and turning herself into a niffin, which is never quite explained in the book but is obviously a very powerful spirit monster who is no longer human. (Earlier in the story it’s revealed that Alice’s older brother died in almost exactly the same way).

I don’t have enough time or space to discuss all of my thoughts on The Magicians. All in all, I’ve read worse books. Will I be reading the rest of the trilogy? Probably not.

#levgrossman #themagicians #bookreview #sexism #unlikablecharacter #magicsystem