I'm really not quite sure what to make of this book. I look at the book as a whole, and think, huh, that was pretty good and then I start to go over the details of it and, frankly, the picture they create isn't all that great.
Don't get me wrong, there were many things about this book that I really liked, but there were a lot that I didn't.
Let's start with the characters:
The main character is Quentin Coldwater (no relation to Quentin Jacobsen of the Paper Towns novel, although they do share the same nickname), and he is also a pain in the ass. From page one, he comes fully equipped with a particularly annoying case of self-loathing depression, not to mention his terribly bothersome, i-think-life-hates-me-even-though-it-clearly-doesn't bad attitude. Fortunately, it wears off a bit (but not totally) later in the book. Other than that minor (major) detail, he's not an altogether unlikable guy. (I mean, he's also a major wuss and has a tendency to develop three or four crushes at once, but hey, isn't that what every reader wants to see in an ideal MC?)
Then there's his trusty gang of sidekicks, who are actually pretty cool. I mean, they all have their own problems and character flaws, but that's okay, because these flaws are actually tolerable. One of my favorite things about the book was the gang Grossman created for Quentin. It's not your typical 2:1 boy to girl ratio, everybody BFFLs since grade school, you already know my deepest secrets and I already know yours so what else is there to talk about? gang of friends. Q meets them gradually as he starts his first term at Brakebills (the magical school), and even then they don't really hit it off right away. As the story progresses, he keeps adding more and more members to the gang, each as unique as the next. It's basically impossible to get bored with them. (Side note: the ratio ended up being 4:2:1 - 4 guys, 2 girls, and a rather insignificant talking bear whom I felt was worthy of including in the ratio, because, you know, talking bears).
Now onto the plot:
The basic premise is this: Quentin gets accepted into a magic university called Brakebills. He spends four years there (the standard is five, but he, of course, skips a level), then moves into the city with his friends, where he squanders away his life until he finds himself in a magical fantasy land from his favorite childhood novels called Fillory and Further. The catch (because there always is one)? Well, for starters, it's a bit more dangerous than they were expecting.
But seriously, this book was 402 pages long, which is much longer than it ever should have been. It's total information overload. Q goes through his four years at the school - in only half of the book. Four years pass by, and you've only made it halfway through the damn book! Someone, somewhere along the line should have realized that what this book really needed was to be split into four, or maybe even five separate novels (and frankly, I'm surprised they didn't - four times the money and all that). But nope, we readers got stuck with the whole four plus years in one book. Fantastic. Great way to hold the reader's attention, really.
I did like the contrast between the "real world" and Q's Fillory and Further novels. It was a clever move on Grossman's part, weaving the two worlds together so that the reader never got too heavy a dose of either one. That whole part of the plot was pretty interesting, actually. I love it when a book manages to surprise the reader, and this one did that very well, (SPOILER) interweaving characters from Fillory and Further into the book as integral - yet minor - characters, and revealing their true identities only at the very end (END SPOILER).
My biggest complaint with the book is how tedious it was. At one point, as Grossman is writing about Fillory and Further, he describes it as "a book that did what books always promised to do and never actually quite did: get you out, really out, of where you were and into something better". Maybe those fictional works of fiction did that, but The Magicians certainly did not. Grossman clearly wanted his story to be as true-to-life as possible (minus the whole spell-casting bit), to the point where it became a nuisance. I mean, I don't know about you guys, but one of the reasons I read is to experience something that I otherwise wouldn't be able to and, like the quote above says, "gets me out". So why on earth would I want to read about the same mundane things I do/feel/experience every day in real life? There's honestly a whole section where Quentin spends the entire time moping around his apartment feeling sorry for himself. Not exactly what I look for in a good book.
And now we've come to the title of the review, possibly my biggest pet peeve of the entire book: its resemblance to Harry Potter.
Obviously, that alone is not a problem, because Harry Potter is amazing and any book that uses the same general ideas must therefore also be pretty cool.
(Quick side note: for those of you who do not know, I am giant Potterhead - probably one of the biggest you'll ever meet).
However - and I could quite possibly be taking this the completely wrong way - it seems to me that the entire book was just Grossman's attempt at a thinly veiled insult to the Harry Potter series. The premise was much the same as HP - school for wizards (or magicians, as they called them in this book) that nobody but the wizards/magicians could access or even see, likable headmaster/dean, wizard sports, right down to the prefect system - but The Magicians made a point of being a book "for grown-ups", whereas books like HP were apparently childish and unrealistic. There are several passages where Grossman compares the magic done in his novel to magic like that of Harry Potter, saying things along the lines of "it was for more involved than simply waving a wand" and other equally degrading statements. This opinion is - of course - reinforced by nearly half of the reviews printed in the front of the book.
Examples:
"The Magicians is to Harry Potter as a shot of Irish whiskey is to a glass of weak tea." - George R. R. Martin
"It's like seeing the worlds of Harry Potter and Narnia through a 3-D magnifying glass." - Naomi Novik
In short, The Magicians was worth the read for all of the interesting bits - just make sure you have the patience to get past everything else. Would I read it again? No. Am I planning to read the sequel? Nope.
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