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The Magicians #1-2
The Magicians and the Magician King
Two novels from "New York Times" bestselling author Lev Grossman: "The Magicians" and its riveting sequel, "The Magician King."
THE MAGICIANS: " "Quentin Coldwater is brilliant but miserable. A high school math genius, he's secretly fascinated with a series of children's fantasy novels set in a magical land called Fillory, and real life is disappointing by comparison. When Quentin is unexpectedly admitted to an elite, secret college of magic, it looks like his wildest dreams may have come true. But his newfound powers lead him down a rabbit hole of hedonism and disillusionment, and ultimately to the dark secret behind the story of Fillory. The land of his childhood fantasies turns out to be much darker and more dangerous than he ever could have imagined...
"
The Magicians" is one of the most daring and inventive works of literary fantasy in years. No one who has escaped into the worlds of Narnia and Harry Potter should miss this breathtaking return to the landscape of the imagination.
THE MAGICIAN KING: " "Quentin Coldwater should be happy. He escaped a miserable Brooklyn childhood, matriculated at a secret college for magic, and graduated to discover that Fillory--a fictional utopia--was actually real. But even as a Fillorian king, Quentin finds little peace. His old restlessness returns, and he longs for the thrills a heroic quest can bring.
Accompanied by his oldest friend, Julia, Quentin sets off--only to somehow wind up back in the real-world and not in Fillory, as they'd hoped. As the pair struggle to find their way back to their lost kingdom, Quentin is forced to rely on Julia's illicitly learned sorcery as they face a sinister threat in a world very far from the beloved fantasy novels of their youth.
THE MAGICIANS: " "Quentin Coldwater is brilliant but miserable. A high school math genius, he's secretly fascinated with a series of children's fantasy novels set in a magical land called Fillory, and real life is disappointing by comparison. When Quentin is unexpectedly admitted to an elite, secret college of magic, it looks like his wildest dreams may have come true. But his newfound powers lead him down a rabbit hole of hedonism and disillusionment, and ultimately to the dark secret behind the story of Fillory. The land of his childhood fantasies turns out to be much darker and more dangerous than he ever could have imagined...
"
The Magicians" is one of the most daring and inventive works of literary fantasy in years. No one who has escaped into the worlds of Narnia and Harry Potter should miss this breathtaking return to the landscape of the imagination.
THE MAGICIAN KING: " "Quentin Coldwater should be happy. He escaped a miserable Brooklyn childhood, matriculated at a secret college for magic, and graduated to discover that Fillory--a fictional utopia--was actually real. But even as a Fillorian king, Quentin finds little peace. His old restlessness returns, and he longs for the thrills a heroic quest can bring.
Accompanied by his oldest friend, Julia, Quentin sets off--only to somehow wind up back in the real-world and not in Fillory, as they'd hoped. As the pair struggle to find their way back to their lost kingdom, Quentin is forced to rely on Julia's illicitly learned sorcery as they face a sinister threat in a world very far from the beloved fantasy novels of their youth.
832 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 2, 2012
13 people are currently reading
1711 people want to read
About the author
Lev Grossman
67 books10.3k followersHi! I'm the author of the #1 New York Times bestselling Magicians trilogy—The Magicians, The Magician King, and The Magician’s Land—which was adapted as a TV show that ran for five seasons on Syfy.
I've also written two novels for children: The Silver Arrow, which the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, People magazine, Apple and Amazon all put on their best-of-the-year lists, and its sequel The Golden Swift. I do some journalist and screenwriting too.
I grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts, the son of two English professors. My twin brother Austin is a writer and game designer, and my older sister Sheba is an artist. Sometimes I live in Brooklyn, New York, other times in Sydney, Australia, where my wife is from. I have three kids and a somehow steadily increasing number of cats.
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Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
July 20, 2018
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March 22, 2013
Who doesn't wish Fillory was real? Or Hogwarts? Or Narnia?
The Magicians and the Magician King bring magic to life in a way day dreamers, young and old, hope for. Quentin Coldwater is just like you, or me, well, not really, he's a genius. But he's a dreamer, as those enmeshed in fantasy often are. As a child he was captivated by Fillory novels, as we were captivated by Narnia, or Hogwarts. For Quintin, though, magic was real, and he was able to become a magician.
The rest of us are lucky to get a three day weekend here and there and maybe a Christmas ham.
The first novel was a mad dash through years of education at Brakebills and then the discovery of Quentin's dream, that Fillory was real. Unfortunately, I felt the mad dash a challenge to keep up with and left some of the character development in the dust. With a slower pace, I think the story would have had the epic permanency these kind of tales work towards. Though many of the characters jumped off the paper into real life (Quentin and Eliot), others were short-changed and I didn't have the desperate longing for them to win—or them to die, depending on my bent.
The second novel, the Magician King, was a language masterpiece. I loved ever line. I could quote one paragraph after the next and the next… I enjoyed the geek references, the snarkiness, the deeper moments. Grossman really matured in his writing style in this second of the series.
Quentin is a king of Fillory, what more could any day dreamer ask for? The Magician King also gave us a look into Julia's past, Quentin's old friend who didn't get into Brakebills. With expert word smithing Grossman gave both characters' stories distinct voices. Jumping from one story line to the other wasn't an eyerolling bout of frustration, but a welcome shift to focus on an old friend.
The Magician King took on a more reasonable pace. The plot was a late bloomer, though. With few hints of anything cohesive until near the middle of the book. It was a day in the life kind of tale, which was fine with Grossman's expert turns of phrases. (seriously, this is the kind of book I would study.)
I wonder if another book is coming out in this series, because the ending was cruel and an unsatisfying conclusion to the Magicians series. I'm unsure exactly what Grossman was trying to say, assuming he was trying to make some point by taking away everything that could make Quentin happy. Grossman ganged up and bullied the main character so much, I felt myself flinching from the blows. If another book is in the works, and the Alice issue is addressed and Quentin gets some form of a Happily Every After, I'd be pleased. As it is, the ending was the Hand of the Author come down to smash the happy world of the main character with no true reason.
The Magicians and the Magician King bring magic to life in a way day dreamers, young and old, hope for. Quentin Coldwater is just like you, or me, well, not really, he's a genius. But he's a dreamer, as those enmeshed in fantasy often are. As a child he was captivated by Fillory novels, as we were captivated by Narnia, or Hogwarts. For Quintin, though, magic was real, and he was able to become a magician.
The rest of us are lucky to get a three day weekend here and there and maybe a Christmas ham.
The first novel was a mad dash through years of education at Brakebills and then the discovery of Quentin's dream, that Fillory was real. Unfortunately, I felt the mad dash a challenge to keep up with and left some of the character development in the dust. With a slower pace, I think the story would have had the epic permanency these kind of tales work towards. Though many of the characters jumped off the paper into real life (Quentin and Eliot), others were short-changed and I didn't have the desperate longing for them to win—or them to die, depending on my bent.
The second novel, the Magician King, was a language masterpiece. I loved ever line. I could quote one paragraph after the next and the next… I enjoyed the geek references, the snarkiness, the deeper moments. Grossman really matured in his writing style in this second of the series.
Quentin is a king of Fillory, what more could any day dreamer ask for? The Magician King also gave us a look into Julia's past, Quentin's old friend who didn't get into Brakebills. With expert word smithing Grossman gave both characters' stories distinct voices. Jumping from one story line to the other wasn't an eyerolling bout of frustration, but a welcome shift to focus on an old friend.
The Magician King took on a more reasonable pace. The plot was a late bloomer, though. With few hints of anything cohesive until near the middle of the book. It was a day in the life kind of tale, which was fine with Grossman's expert turns of phrases. (seriously, this is the kind of book I would study.)
I wonder if another book is coming out in this series, because the ending was cruel and an unsatisfying conclusion to the Magicians series. I'm unsure exactly what Grossman was trying to say, assuming he was trying to make some point by taking away everything that could make Quentin happy. Grossman ganged up and bullied the main character so much, I felt myself flinching from the blows. If another book is in the works, and the Alice issue is addressed and Quentin gets some form of a Happily Every After, I'd be pleased. As it is, the ending was the Hand of the Author come down to smash the happy world of the main character with no true reason.
June 18, 2016
i keep wishing to throw it away. depressing book. i am midway in the second book.. nothing is asking me to grip the book. its just too depressing, at times boring, characters behave in a weird way. i get it… magic..the real world is not as charming as in fiction books.. but hey.. we read books to walk away from the depressive stuff.. your books make me feel gloomy. i will finish for the sake of story.. theres no fun. i keep wishing something will happen. it never does.. and when it happens, the author sadly has not written in a format that it plays i front of your eyes, unlike the potter books. its too difficult to imagine with the way he writes. and all for nothing. sad quentin. sad story. "unrealistic" fiction. depressive but deeply thought and creative neverthless
May 21, 2019
I thought this book was better than the first in the series actually. I am starting on the third book today to see how this all ends up. I know people get aggravated by the flaws the protagonists have. However, real human beings have flaws and one of the most abundant flaws is not being happy with what you have and wanting more. Or being upset when things are not fair in the world. Then some people don't like what happened to Julia (shh, not revealing here) but that happens way too much in this world and that is just a fact. Overall, I think it's a great series for fans for adult fantasy.
October 25, 2013
These books (and genre) were introduced to me by my husband, and I am glad for it. This is a bit of Harry Potter for the Grown Ups, but has a much more layered sophistication in the writing, characters, and plot than you might expect. I would rate the first book, The Magicians, higher than the follow up of The Magician King, but they are both quality reads.
March 29, 2013
The Magicians, an interesting twist on the coming of age magician novel. Sex, drugs, and magic, who could ask for more. But, what happens when you get everything you ever wanted but still seek adventure? Welcome to the Magician King.
February 22, 2016
Love the TV series and now I know why!!
February 7, 2017
Thought that I got conned with some of the excellent book review as the story line spiral to nowhere until page 400, really losing interest, and than the story unfold with some interesting magical concepts and insights. So I am giving it a four star..
May 27, 2017
Fantastic! Shades of Narnia, but darker in the vein of Pan's Labrynth. This is the story I didn't know I'd been wanting to read for a long time. Can't wait to see how it ends!
November 24, 2019
Story line is good but drags at a few points
January 4, 2017
Not sure how I felt about this book don't know that I was entertained, don't know if I related to the characters certainly wasn't excited to see what happened next. All in all I wasn't moved by the characters or their trials and tribulations.
January 15, 2015
I came very late to the Harry Potter scene. Actually, I don't know that I ever really arrived there. I don't know how old I was when the first one came out, but when I was in hospital, a friend of mine gave me a heap of fantasy books to read. She thought that I would need a break from my real life, and Harry Potter was her favorite escape.
But I was seventeen, and while I thought the world was clever, I couldn't connect with magical teenagers whose problems in no way resembled my own. Harry Potter was a tragic orphan who never got dangerously drunk, never used heroin or popped a suspicious tablet at a party, never slept with someone and then regretted it. Harry never seriously wondered if he'd be better off dead. Certainly, Harry never ended up in a psychiatric hospital, and the one character I remember who did was hardly a character at all--more of a loose caricature of mental illness who was there to give depth to Neville Longbottom.
Quentin Coldwater is the wizard I would have connected with. His world is as bothered with political intrigue and long-term social issues as the one we live in. He makes mistakes and then suffers for them, and like a real person you sometimes want to shake him, and then as he grows you end up cheering for him.
He makes the same mistakes thousands, hundreds of thousands, of people make. Being a wizard doesn't give him any better tools to fix things than we have; he has to learn, and then he has to live.
The point of him is that he's not a hero, but he wants to be one in his own life if nowhere else. And who among us can say we feel differently? He learns, little by little, that his story is not the only one that matters, and that he is sometimes a footnote when he would rather be a star.
If you loved Harry Potter, consider this the grown up, real-world version. If you've never read fantasy, consider this a fascinating series that explores why we need to dream, and the dangers of forgetting that there's wonder in the world we're already in.
But I was seventeen, and while I thought the world was clever, I couldn't connect with magical teenagers whose problems in no way resembled my own. Harry Potter was a tragic orphan who never got dangerously drunk, never used heroin or popped a suspicious tablet at a party, never slept with someone and then regretted it. Harry never seriously wondered if he'd be better off dead. Certainly, Harry never ended up in a psychiatric hospital, and the one character I remember who did was hardly a character at all--more of a loose caricature of mental illness who was there to give depth to Neville Longbottom.
Quentin Coldwater is the wizard I would have connected with. His world is as bothered with political intrigue and long-term social issues as the one we live in. He makes mistakes and then suffers for them, and like a real person you sometimes want to shake him, and then as he grows you end up cheering for him.
He makes the same mistakes thousands, hundreds of thousands, of people make. Being a wizard doesn't give him any better tools to fix things than we have; he has to learn, and then he has to live.
The point of him is that he's not a hero, but he wants to be one in his own life if nowhere else. And who among us can say we feel differently? He learns, little by little, that his story is not the only one that matters, and that he is sometimes a footnote when he would rather be a star.
If you loved Harry Potter, consider this the grown up, real-world version. If you've never read fantasy, consider this a fascinating series that explores why we need to dream, and the dangers of forgetting that there's wonder in the world we're already in.
May 16, 2013
I really liked these books. In The Magicians, the Quentin is a little too whiney sometimes, but still a great adventure. The Magician King is a better book, more interesting, and the Julia character is damaged yet compelling. It is full of completely unexpected, yet inevitable plot twists. I heard that a 3rd book will come out & I plan to buy it right away - thats a huge endorsement for somebody who buys all her books second hand.
August 12, 2014
I really liked this book up until about the halfway point. Then the heavy alcohol and drug use started. This is supposed to be a young adult book, but the substance abuse, coupled with gratuitous frequent spattering of the "F"-bomb not only kept me from really enjoying the story, but will prevent me from ever allowing my own young adults from reading this author. So sad when such a promising story is ruined in such a way.
August 2, 2013
I loved The Magicians so much that when I finished reading it I immediately bought The Magician King on Amazon and read it straight through. I didn't get out of my pyjamas all day. Some Harry Potter-like elements (a school of magic!) with shades of Narnia (talking animals!) but also with sex and swearing, which the aforementioned series sadly lacked. What's not to love?
November 7, 2013
Great book, ending was completely different from what I had hoped. Well written.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 5, 2013
I read both books individually, not as listed but enjoyed both novels. If your looking for decent read, I recommend both!
April 10, 2014
It was okay. Imaginative. It was written well, but not all that interesting as a whole.
February 13, 2016
Still too Chronicles of Narnia to be original, but I enjoy reading about their magic world. Good hard lessons
May 5, 2016
Excellent!
September 29, 2016
fairy tale for grown ups
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews