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Sunday, September 17, 2017

The Magician's by Lev Grossman (Read April 2017) - 2 star

This is my April NNCC book club selection.   Quentin Coldwater is a high school student who himself admitted to a very secretive and exclusive college of magic in upstate New York, Brakebills. This book was explained to us as an Adult version of Harry Potter.  And yeah the first part it, it is after part one that things go wonky.  Part 1 Quentin is in college and we get to have fun learning all about his magical school, it was great.  It had much more adult themes and there was drugs, and booze and sex, it wasn't Hogwarts for sure.  I enjoyed this section, I wish it had ended when he graduated, because it went down hill from there for me.
Then Quentin graduates and suddenly we are in Reality Bites, he doesn't know what to do with his life after graduation so he does NOTHING.  He is lazy and parties every day, eventually fucking up his relationship with Alice (an amazing girl) when low and behold his old school rival shows up with a magic button.  And suddenly we jump from Reality Bites into the Narnia novels, only they set in Fillory to avoid copyright issues I think.  Again much like Hogwarts, Fillory i.e. Narnia is a much darker place than the originals.  I felt like all the idea in this book were just recycled, lets take another books storyline, darken it and call our own.  I was very disappointed.

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