The Magicians
Quentin Coldwater is a brilliant, chronically unhappy Brooklyn high-school senior who still rereads the Fillory books — a series of children's fantasies about an English family who stumble into a magical kingdom. On his way to a college interview he finds himself instead on the grounds of Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy, a secret school in upstate New York, sitting an examination he never applied for. He passes, and magic turns out to be real.
It also turns out to be work: years of finger positions, dead languages and circumstance tables, punctuated by the discovery that being one of the most gifted people alive does not make anyone happy. Quentin falls in with the Physical Kids — Eliot, Janet and Josh, and his classmate Alice Quinn — and their brilliance curdles into hard drinking and aimlessness. Then something enormous forces its way into a Brakebills classroom, and the school's careful order stops looking like protection.
Graduation leaves them rich, unemployed and bored in Manhattan, until the possibility opens that Fillory is not a story. Lev Grossman's first Magicians novel, an Alex Award winner in 2010, is the book that made "Harry Potter for adults" a shorthand and then spent four hundred pages complicating it: a portal fantasy about people who get everything they wished for and find the wish was the easy part. It opens the Magicians trilogy, continued in The Magician King and The Magician's Land, and was adapted into the Syfy television series.
A gifted, dissatisfied Brooklyn teenager admitted to Brakebills, who cannot stop believing that somewhere there is a life that will finally feel like the books.
Quentin's classmate at Brakebills: shy, precise and the strongest natural magician of their year.
An older Physical Kid, conspicuously brilliant and conspicuously drinking, who takes Quentin under his wing.
A Physical Kid from California whose bravado covers a good deal of insecurity; expert in cold magic.
The comic relief of the Physical Kids, and a more capable magician than he lets anyone believe.
This novel is the first entry in a trilogy that continues with The Magician King and concludes with The Magician's Land.
A television series based on the trilogy aired on Syfy for five seasons starting in 2015.