Review:
So, I finished this trilogy, "The Magicians", by Lev Grossman.
This is an actual trilogy. Three stories that follow each other, but each one could be a standalone, although the whole is richer than the parts. It follows our "hero" Quentin Coldwater in and out of school, out and in of one world or another, through the second fifteen years of his life.
One interesting thing (for me) is that the character starts fully adolescent (emo Harry Potter!) and ends up, I feel, fully grownup, acting like a responsible, if unusual, adult.
The books are crisscrossed by Fillory, a barely concealed Narnia, as Narnia should have been, actually deep and interesting books about magic and children instead of fake and shallow christian tracts featuring cardboard cutouts of children. Mind you, the actual Fillory books described within sound like an even dopier Narnia, but the magic in these books (the real ones, The Magicians, The Magician King, and The Magician's Land) is to create a "real" Fillory that's oh, so much better.
If copyright didn't exist, I can imagine Pevensies instead of Chatwins, and a deeper, interesting recreation of Narnia inside these books, but maybe it's better to have a rewrite of books that are not written instead, sort of like Borges writing about unexisting books, movies, encyclopedias and authors, and we just saved time, by avoiding even the existence of "real" Fillory books, and having the fiction of a "real" Fillory instead, as a shortcut.
In short, I really liked it, and am game for anything the author publishes (started now on Codex, an earlier work), just like I was for anything his identical twin brother Austin writes.
