The Magicians by Lev Grossman review

Mostly good times.

April 26, 2025

Categorization: Fantasy

Where read: On Kindle

Some spoilers.

I picked this up years ago based on a blurb I saw on Amazon that said that this book was “like Harry Potter for grown-ups” or something similar that I first thought was an inane remark, because the reason for Harry Potter’s enduring popularity is precisely the fact that it is loved by both grown-ups and children. The reason for its continuous commercial success is that grown-ups have money to spend on harry Potter things. Like, I bought my wand and my Hedwig stuffed toy when I was in my thirties. My parents would have just laughed at me if I had asked them to spend money on it when I was a kid.

But elder grump comment aside, I understood what the blurb was trying to say and proceeded to download the first book of the series, The Magicians.

I loved the book and continue to love it until this day. And I understood further what that reviewer was trying to say. Not since Harry Potter and The Name of the Wind, has a writer has been able to capture so well the excitement and mystery of what it is like to study in a school of magic. I have read a few good ones, Anthony Ryan’s Blood Song series, Sarah Beth Durst's Queens of Renthia series, Mark Lawrence's The Red Sister series that begin or take place in a sort of magic school setting, and while they have all have their own merit, they didn't world-build a magical school that I really wanted to be in.

The hero in The Magicians is a disgruntled, misunderstood teenager that is about to attend a university interview when is suddenly accepted into a magic university and swept into a world of mystery. There, he trains to become a great magician and attends classes, makes friends, until something terrible happens in his school and he is forced to adventure deeper into a magical realm loosely based on Narnia and unlock its secrets.

Lev Grossman’s writing is real and messy and perfect for this book, because it truly feels like it is being told from the point of view of an unhappy teenager. I feel like his writing and worldbuilding style is a bit similar to Neil Gaiman’s, a powerful worldbuilding ability that at the same time, doesn’t take itself too seriously.  It is dark and funny and painful and relatable and exciting, and he made me want to be one of the brilliant students that get accepted into the magician’s school. I wanted to go to class and meet the professors and learn how to move marbles with my mind and how to shapeshift. I wanted to meet all the weird and wonderful students and teachers in the school. The way that Grossman describes his world is deep and fully-fleshed out, ripe for the imagination.

The Magicians is my favorite book of the series because I love the university-magic setting. The next two books The Magician King and The Magician’s Land are also enjoyable in that they complete the setting in which The Magicians takes place, but my buy-into the world came entirely in the first book. It is the most memorable and the most exciting read of the series. The next two books deal more into the journey into the Narnia-like world, which while still good reads, were less appealing from a world-I-want-to-be-in perspective, which is not to say they aren’t great adventures in themselves.

There is one thing that… I wouldn’t say I disliked, because overall I love the series and find it hard to directly dislike anything in it, as I respect that it is part of Grossman’s worldbuilding -  it was the inclusion of themes of sexual violence in order to drive the plot or to make it “higher stakes”, as it were.

This is not a theme that overruns the books, in the manner of the entirely distasteful Terry Goodkind series. In the first book The Magicians, the idea is only introduced at the very end, and in the third book, much more potently but also only in one part. I don’t quite know how to describe my feelings on this subject. Because while the logical part of me recognizes that sexual violence is obviously part of our reality, and this literary work is a form of art, and one of the points of of art is to interpret and subdue reality, and so Grossman inarguably has artistic license here to introduce whatever he wants to complete his work, the fact of the matter is that it made me uncomfortable. It made me a bit uncomfortable in the first book, but I respected the way it was introduced int the story at the end, being quite brief and well, understandable? I suppose. But the fact that the theme was introduced in the third book again in a much more disturbing manner, made me much more uncomfortable. The fact is, I don’t like it when books raise stakes or drive the plot using sexual violence, and I can’t help how I feel.

I realize that this might be a limiting imposition on the genre, but I always thought that Fantasy as a genre exists within some thematic constraints anyway- a fact which bothered me when I first realized it but have since accepted and embraced. I mean, when was the last time you read a Fantasy book that followed the adventures of a hero that pillaged a village because it pleased him to do so? At some level, your Fantasy hero will be, for lack of a better word, be Good person (usually chaotic Good). And not being a fantasy writer myself, and being a believer of artistic expression and freedom of speech, it would never do to make any kind of restrictive pronouncement on this, like “Fantasy books should not contain sexual violence”. I guess the closest I can come is that to me personally, Fantasy offers an escape from reality, and there are certain aspects of reality, sexual violence definitely being one, that I personally don’t want to find in my escape-world.

I don’t think I’m alone in this either, as I remember discussing Fantasy reads with an acquaintance (a much more casual reader of Fantasy than this obsessed nerd-goblin) about a year ago, and while comparing notes as to what books the other had already read, I asked “have you tried The Magicians by Lev Grossman? It was great, I really enjoyed that series, it does remind me a bit of Harry Potter”.

“No”, she replied. “Is it really good? I saw that it might be too dark for me for my tastes’”.

Thinking about how much I enjoyed the world in The Magicians book, I was about to pipe up “Not at all, you should definitely read it!” But then I remembered the theme I mentioned, and was forced to answer quietly, “It is dark. I wouldn’t pick it up then if I were you”.

And that exchange pretty much sums up how I feel about The Magicians series.