capriceum

This book was everything I ever wanted in a fantasy story! There were so many things to love.

First off, about the magic. I love that magic is for high level thinkers, people who actually try their best at everything they do. It makes so much sense for its esoteric-ness to be based on that. And the magic system was brilliantly designed. I liked the spells were named after people and that they could be in different languages. It added a realistic multicultural element to the setting. I also liked that Circumstances needed to be taken into account when casting spells, and that different worlds (like Fillory) had different Circumstances that affected magic. And I enjoyed the little details, like how electronics work unpredictably with magic.

The Neitherlands was another awesome feature of this universe I liked, because it's such an elegant solution to a metaphysical problem. I love the bit when Penny says, "The thing is, the more I study it, the more I think it's exactly the opposite--that our world has much less substance than the City, and what we experience as reality is really just a footnote to what goes on there. An epiphenomenon."

There are lots of differences between the SyFy show and this book. Some of them have to do with character. Janet is called Margo in the show. Alice has dark hair in the book, and I like that appearance much better than the blonde Alice they went with for the show. Penny, however, is a pale, "moon-faced," blue-eyed punk in the book, and I prefer Arjun Gupta's portrayal. So I picture Arjun Gupta as a punk while I read and disregard anything that contradicts my mental image. Quentin is more of an insufferable asshole in the book, but given the fact that he's obviously dealing with depression, it makes him still painfully relatable. In fact the driving force behind the plot is the hollow, unhappy feeling Quentin continually runs away from but can't escape, which is downplayed in the show.

Some of the differences have to do with plot. The group graduates from Brakebills before anything with going to Fillory happens. And we don't get to see Julia's descent into obsession from her perspective, so her character arc is much less prominent in the book as opposed to the show. For the majority of the book there's no real outside threat like there is in the show. There's the appearance of the Beast in the classroom, but we don't see him again until the last hundred pages, where he suddenly reappears and causes major damage. The whole book is quite fast-paced, but even that feels like it comes suddenly out of nowhere. The show did a much better job consistently increasing the pressure of the Big External Conflict across the story in that regard.

I never got into Harry Potter (I read two chapters of the first book before giving up on the author's voice), but so many reviews tout this as an adult Harry Potter. Which makes sense. This has all the things I wanted to get from HP but didn't: contemporary setting in the modern world, complete with all the gritty realities like drugs, sex, complicated relationships, and mental illness. It's a fully fleshed universe with a beautifully devised magic system. It's been years since I started a new series but after this amazing start I can't wait to go deeper with the next book.