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A friend of mine recommended I watch The Magicians, so I picked up the audiobook to see if I would like it in a general way. I had known that the book is pretty different from the tv show but I thought it would give me a general idea.
A few years ago there was a big deal made about how men don’t really form deep friendships anymore and there was a male loneliness epidemic. https://www.npr.org/2025/02/17/1263527043/its-been-a-minute-male-loneliness-epidemic-real. I am not fully sure why this kept popping up in my brain while listening to The Magicians by Lev Grossman, but it did. Make no mistake, Quentin Coldwater is not the most likeable character. He is forever unsatisfied with his life, searching for something to give it meaning. He discovers that magic is real, and ends up going to a school of magic, Brakebills, to learn. I didn’t hate Quentin, but he was certainly hard to like. He is clearly privileged, and sort of acknowledges that, but then he’s bored…a lot. He’s like a 10 year old in attention span with not a lot of zest for life.
I really liked that this is a college and not a high school equivalent. There are higher stakes, and deeper relationships. I was also surprised that we sped through the college years and went straight to life after school with a few friends. Quentin discovers that the location of his favorite fantasy novels, Fillory, is real and he travels there with his friends. I also really liked that his friends felt like fully fleshed out human beings, and weren’t just around to prop up the main character. The prose in this story is beautiful, rich and lovely. A lot of times the first book is pretty sparce with the visuals because you have to set up the world and the characters and things can get lost. Not so here.
I generally don’t mind that Quentin is not the pure, super motivated hero. He messes things up and gets knocked down a lot. I wouldn’t expect someone fresh out of college to save the day. It wasn’t the best book I’ve read, but there’s enough there to keep listening to the series. I immediately went and downloaded the next book in the series.