Book Review: The Magicians and The Magician King

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 seventeen and going through rehab, 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.