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Nauseous and sweaty, he finds himself at the edge of a wide lawn, a large stone house in the distance, the angle of the sun and season of the year all wrong. As Quentin chases the paper toward the increasingly narrow point of the triangle, he slowly realizes he is not in the city anymore. Quentin runs after it as it is whipped through a narrow, triangular shaped community garden. But, before he can get even nearly as excited as I would be if I found Harry Potter VIII, a folded piece of paper slips out of the notebook and is carried forward by the wind. When he opens it, he finds "The Magicians: Book Six of Fillory and Further" handwritten on the first page. Walking home on his own, Quentin opens the envelope and finds it holds a much-used notebook. After a slightly unsettling conversation with a pretty, blond paramedic, Quentin and James leave with manilla envelopes bearing their names, thrust upon them by the blond. It had been diverted somewhere else, to somebody else." Quentin and James arrive at the home of their interviewer and find him deceased. Quentin, as all fantasy heroes must, is sure that his real life has been "mislaid through some clerical error by the cosmic bureaucracy. As they walk, Quentin ponders his unhappiness, knowing that the consolation he finds in the Fillory books is also probably the reason Julia will never sleep with him, and wonders if Princeton will reveal his "real life" to him. The start of The Magicians finds seventeen-year-old New Yorker Quentin, along with the charming James and his girlfriend, the "pale, freckled, dreamy Julia, who played oboe and knew more physics than he did was never going to sleep with" Quentin, heading to a college interview with a Princeton alum. The Magicians even has a somewhat childishly drawn map of Fillory covering the endpapers. Quentin has read these books so many times, pored over them and pondered them, that, when he experiences the magic of an unseen world for the first time it is not the jolt to his senses one might expect. Like the Pevensies and Narnia, Plover's books are populated by the Chatwin children who pair up in varying combinations for adventures in the series. In The Magicians, Quentin's childhood fascination that has carried into his adolescence centers on the quintet of books known as "Fillory and Further" by the American expat living in Cornwall, Christopher Plover, published in the 1930s.
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Quentein, like most of us, has grown up with in a world that holds shelves and shelves full of books where unseen worlds are visited. Thinking about The Magicians and Quentin's first visit to Brakebills, I think I understand this phenomena. I have been reading a lot of fantasy lately that involves unseen worlds and one thing I have noticed above all else is that the characters rarely express amazement or even comment when they slip into these worlds for the first time. There is a depth to Quentin's emotions and internal dialogue that you just don't find in YA books. And, while there is a lot of drinking, a minimal amount of sex and swearing, the main difference between The Magicians and a YA book is the profound sense of sadness and futility experienced by the main character Quentin Coldwater by the time he graduates from Brakebills College and realizes the nagging, aching wish that he has carried with him from childhood. However, as someone who has read a handful of adult books in the last five years because all I read anymore is kid's and YA titles, I read The Magicians hoping understand what makes an adult book different from a YA book, especially when the main characters are teenagers. She read it and the sequel and, when asked the differences between these adult books and YA/kid's books she summed it up by saying, "They drink a lot and have some sex." Having read The Magicians (and, as Lisa Brown humorously sums it up in her 3 Panel Review at the bottom of the page) I'd say that's pretty accurate, in a very general way. I bought The Magicians when it came out because I was intrigued by the comparisons and I thought it might be a good transition from YA (young adult) to adult books for my daughter, who was sixteen at the time. But, The Magicians really owes more of a debt to The Chronicles of Narnia in terms of the underlying fantasy that drives this story.
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It's been touted as "Harry Potter for adults" and Brakebills College shares some definite echoes of Hogwarts. The Magiciansby Lev Grossman came out in 2009.