The Magicians
If you like Harry Potter, but you don't love it, because you can't really get past the fact that while the story is gripping in an opiates-are-addicting kind of way the writing is, frankly, pretty terrible, what with the paper-thin characterization and the hamfisted retconning and the way that in a world allegedly torn apart by dark and violent magic not a single one of the A- or B-tier central characters bites it (come on, at least Neville or Luna should've gone in for a heroic act of self-sacrifice) — and also if you were one of those kids who devoured all those fantasy novels with literary integrity, like J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, but also read all the marvelous crap, too, like Tamora Pierce and David Eddings — and then you grew up and never actually stopped reading books about people discovering that magic is real, but it was the forty to a sixty of zeitgeisty literary fiction, through which you wound up discovering that, cliches be damned, your favorite books of the last decade have been A Home at the End of the World and The Corrections — guys, if this is you, get off the computer and go read The Magicians by Lev Grossman right this very fucking second, because the reason I'm writing a stupid blog post at 3:24 in the morning is because I absolutely completely could not put this book down until I finished it, and now that I'm done I don't want to stop thinking about it. I don't know yet if I loved this book, but it definitely ate me alive.
Posts
