There's Something Strange About Harry Potter

            It’s not his lightning scar or his circular glasses. It's not even the fact that he is the "chosen one". In todays books, even “chosen ones” are not in short supply. Then what is it? Well, as far as I know, he has never read a single book. Not one. If I'd been him, I wouldn’t have survived without them in that stuffy broom closet of his. I mean, come-on, what does he do all day, stare at the ceiling? And maybe not Harry, but at least Hermione must have. But no, apparently Hogwarts exists in a world in which children don't read stories, or if they do they are suspiciously quiet about it. 

Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, however, is different from J.K Rowling's Harry Potter. The Magicians is a trilogy in which the characters are just like us: they spent long hours as kids wishing to fall into the magical worlds trapped in paper and ink. In The Magicians, that place is Fillory, and every kid with even the slightest hint of nerdiness devoured Cristopher Plover’s Fillory and Further. Just as we have all hoped that just this once, instead of meeting the solid wood that the back of that mysterious closet we might fall into another world, they have too. Well, at least most of us have. I think. Eventually however, we resign ourselves to the fact that what we see is what we get, that there is nothing deeper than the surface. In The Magicians, however, Quentin Coldwater never loses that obsession. In a way, he never grows up. When I was first introduced to Quentin, I was looking at what seemed to be my near reflection. Here was someone who truly understood my longing for the fictional. However, there was a big difference between me and him: he is invited to Brakebills, a collage for magic. Of course he is. I mean, come on, how could we have been surprised by that, what with a book titled The Magicians? Though, in Brakebills it’s not enough to wave the wand and say the words. Magic at Brakebills is more like grinding the hardest subject ever taken. In other words, it’s magic as it would I imagine it would be in real life. Distinctly unmagical. At least for Quentin it is. But for me, the world of The Magicians is just as interesting as any other book I have read. That’s when I realized that when I read a book about a Hero’s Journey, I feel as though I am also on a one. That is why we love those books so much. But then I began thinking: if the grim, arduous, and academic magic of Brakebills still seemed to be magical to me, what if I looked at my school in the same way? That’s when I realized that if I squint a bit, Calculus is almost magical. And so is Chemistry, and Biology, Physics and for that matter even Literature. Electrons teleporting from one state to another? Dinosaurs slowly but surely evolving into roosters? Dark matter that fights the forces of gravity, causing the universe to expand at an ever accelerating rate? Maybe not history though.

If you need a fantasy book unlike anything you have read before, or if you have made it through this long post, I encourage you to check out Lev Grossman’s The Magicians. There is too much bad fantasy out there, but don’t get me wrong, I’ve read and enjoyed my fair share of it. But The Magicians is at least a brief respite, a book that straddles the worlds of literature and fantasy. It is perfect for a teenager who expects themselves to be an adult, but isn’t quite there yet. That, I think, is almost all of us.