The Magicians - Lev Grossman (The Magicians #1)

What an awful book.  I hope the TV series is better, because this was a work of pretension and drabble that I haven't encountered since I read The Name of the Wind.  (Yes, I went there.)

The Magicians is basically Fifty Shades of Gray for the Chronicles of Narnia, but with less BDSM and better writing.  What does this mean?  It's fanfiction, people.  Come on.  It's Grossman reading the Narnia books--particularly The Magician's Nephew in this case--and going, "Hey, I can write that better.  With alcohol and drugs and threesomes!"

This is a book that thrives off the nostalgia it invokes for its vastly superior source material.  Here, the plot follows the whiny main character Quentin, who is determined to be unhappy and destroy any bit of happiness he may possess, and even admits this at various times, even when he has pretty much everything.  Quentin is obsessed with a series of books about Fillory (Narnia) that is found by going through the back of a clock (wardrdobe) by the Chatwins (Pevensies).  The books came to a rather unsatisfactory end, but when Quentin is recruited to a school for magic instead of college, he thinks he's found something even better.  What follows could have been an excellent magical school story...except then Grossman ruined it by tacking on a Fillory/Narnia adventure in the second half of the book that had none of the charm or appeal of the first half, and way more ridiculous drama and stupid decision making.  Other parallels between Fillory and Narnia are the magic buttons/rings, the Neitherlands/Wood Between the Worlds, four thrones that can only be occupied by humans from Earth rather than by anyone from their own land...you know, that sort of stuff.

That said, there were some cool parts of this book.  The incident with The Beast at Brakebills was suitably chilling.  Brakebills South was awesome.  The Neitherlands, despite being an obvious riff on the Wood Between the Worlds, were very, very cool, and I wish we had actually seen more of them.  Brakebills itself offered a heck of a lot of charm, and was in fact the strongest part of the book--stronger than any individual character, setting, or plot line was.  But the insufferable characters, who upon departing Brakebills immediately became a full bunch of assholes rather than just entitled schoolkids, were a huge drag.  They showed no signs of character growth or attempts at redemption.  They held all the power in the world, and instead of choosing to do something with it, they got drunk, did drugs, hurt each other, and scammed non-magical people.  Even Alice, who I initially had hopes for, I ended up hating.  I have no sympathy for anything that happened to any of these people.

After reading this book, I immediately went back and read The Magician's Nephew and got a start on The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, too.  The Magicians' power lies almost entirely in what Grossman draws from Narnia...so why not just read the books that did it right the first time?

2 stars out of 5.