Week 7: The Novel of Spiritual Education

             The Magicians is a great example of how young adults would realistically react to going to a Magical college. In this story magic colleges are difficult to get into; you have to take a long exam that determines whether you’re in or not. If not, you will be sent back home without any memory of anything that has happened. Magic in this world turns out to be extremely difficult to use/perform and according to the main character Quentin; it is also boring and tedious. There is even a magical game like Quidditch that is way more difficult to play and has nothing to do with flying on broomsticks.

Quentin is accepted into Brakebills, a college for magicians where he finds that although this is everything he’s ever wanted, he still has to deal with his own depression and anti-social issues. Eventually he witnesses a horrific scene where a strange middle aged man with a branch covering his face eats a student then vanishes just like that.  This world suddenly becomes a lot scarier for everyone in it. Quentin is then placed into a group of magicians called Physicals. He undergoes a series of difficult tasks, one of them being literally going to Antarctica and having to survive without speaking and then being turned into animals and having to adapt.

In this world there is even an equivalent to the Harry Potter books called Fillory and Further. It turns out that the world in those books also exists and after Quentin graduates, he goes to this world with his classmates. Things become even more difficult and challenging once in Fillory, it also becomes much more dangerous. Characters die left and right and in the end, Quentin can’t take anymore of it and returns to his normal average life.

What I like about this story, although it can be annoying at times, is how Quentin overall reacts to magic. You would think this would be a dream come true and the main character would be excited to be in such a world but it is the exact opposite. Unlike Harry Potter, in the Magicians world you would probably prefer to be a normal person where it is safer and technically easier to go about life. It becomes frustrating at points where you want the character to enjoy what he now has but realistically, being in a magic college may be no different than being in normal college. This book teaches you that magic or no magic, life is hard and you have to deal with it.