After browsing reddit looking for books that took place in magical schools, I came across this one.
It starts quite well, Quentin is an interesting figure and, although I think Grossman did a pretty rushed job covering idk how many years of college in a few pages, this process was fun to follow. However, some questions started popping up in my mind, like: Why would a 18 year old boy that studied a lot of physics and was a genius would never question the existence of magic? Why was Quentin not even interested in Alice’s experiment? These ones and a lot of others showed me how rushed things were and possibly how shallow it also was.
Then, they left Brakebills and things started going down. Quentin suddenly turned into an alcoholic despicaple a-hole, Penny who is not supposed to be a likable guy is the likable guy, and we don’t even know how to feel about the others. They are ALWAYS so depressed even though they do not suffer from any specific thing (and can fucking do magic) and they don’t even think about the possibility of being clinically depressed. No one seem to care.
This book just felt to me as a HP kind of story mixed up with some Narnia but ended up being bad at doing both.
It had some cool scenes though. It kept me thinking that if Grossman wrote a more ordinary fantasy novel I would pretty much like it.
That’s it. Those who have read it, tell me your thoughts. Thank you for reading!
by picknickles