However, unlike most of the flights back, I actually wasn't totally depressed while on the plane, because the one benefit to heading home was I got to get back into the book I was reading on the flight down: Lev Grossman's The Magicians. I have a ton of work to catch up on, and I'm clearly not moving fast (E & I may have taken some time to enjoy ourselves & relax, but we still rolled pretty hard this weekend, and I am exhausted today), but I will jot down a few quick notes and then take the lazy-girl's route and throw in a couple links to what other people have said about the book.
For starters, I don't really remember how this one ended up on my list (I think maybe it was in one of the Harvard Bookstore monthly fliers?), but I am really glad it did. It's essentially an homage to C.S. Lewis, loving but jaded and critical, and some of the other teenagers + fantasy usual suspects. Since the main character is a kid who gets whisked away to a school for magicians, the obvious parallel is J.K. Rowling and Harry Potter (although way less twee and annoying, and way darker - not just hints at "big themes," but sex, drugs, and alcohol, if not rock and roll).
I think the Narnia references are the deeper and more pertinent ones, though - the boy's favorite books growing up, which he learns may or may not be based in reality, are a pentalogy of childrens/young adults novels about several siblings who get pulled in and out of a magical land as they are needed to perform various feats and quests where talking mice sail ships and bunnies drink tea. Oh, and the only way to get you there under your own steam is by jumping in and out of ponds in a sort of deserted ante-chamber world, with the right rings...er, BUTTONS...in hand...
Sounds so derivative, but it's not. On the one hand, clearly you need to love the Lewis series, and the whole "teenagers fight evil with magic" genre to even start this project (and know them back and forth), but there's also a darker, snarky, and ultimately rather depressing side to the whole book - it's like when you grow up and first realize your parents are just as flawed as any one else in the world. It's not that you don't love them, but you've seen the other side, and the original innocence doesn't come back. When magic doesn't ultimately solve any of the protagonist's problems, any of the worlds described in the book look infinitely uglier, no matter what the enchantments.
This is already too long...okay, obviously some Tolkien in the stew, as well, although not much, maybe a whiff of Susan Cooper? I kept almost seeing it, but then I wasn't sure if I was making it up - certainly it would be a bigger stretch than the others. Basically, if the book were chicken soup, the broth is Rowling, the chicken, carrots, and onions are Lewis, Tolkien is the celery, and Cooper would be the rosemary, or the garlic - just a hint of a taste, if it's even there at all (of course, in this book as in soup, if it's not, it should have been).
Only other major point would probably be that I finished it and went "huh?" - towards the end I thought there was no way it would be wrapped up, and that it must have a sequel, then Grossman whipped up all the loose ends, and then in the last pages introduced a new-ish direction, and re-introduced a character, which threw me. No longer, though, as when I googled the book this morning, Wikipedia informed me that a sequel has been written and will be published this fall. Which makes MUCH more sense, and I will definitely read it. Also, just as a side note, not only did I enjoy the book enough to look it up online, I then read two reviews, from the Times and the Onion:
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