The Magicians

About The Magicians

This dark academia fantasy novel follows Quentin Coldwater, a Brooklyn teenager obsessed with a series of children's fantasy books set in a magical land called Fillory, who is recruited to Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy — an actual school for actual magic. Lev Grossman writes fantasy as literary fiction: the magic is hard to learn, the curriculum is rigorous, and the arrival of Quentin's fantasy does not resolve his depression or his fundamental inability to connect with other people. Brakebills is Oxford crossed with a conservatory, and Grossman treats the study of magic with the same exhausting seriousness that medical school treats medicine. The novel is deliberately in conversation with Narnia and the Hogwarts tradition, asking what happens when a fantasy-obsessed person actually gets the genre they always wanted and discovers it does not fix anything. Quentin is a morally complicated protagonist — brilliant, self-pitying, and frequently unkind — and Grossman refuses to let him off the hook. The mystery of Fillory's real nature, slowly revealed in the final third, earns its emotional weight. For readers who want fantasy that interrogates its own genre conventions and treats magic as something real people would use badly, The Magicians is essential.

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