Top Ten Tuesday: Book On My Summer Reading List

Time again for Top Ten Tuesday (hosted by the Broke and the Bookish).  This week’s theme is a “summer freebie” so I’m going to make a list of the books I hope to read this summer.  (We just signed up for our library’s summer reading program yesterday and I’m ready to go!)

1.  Lockdown by Laurie R. King
2. The Magician’s Land by Lev Grossman
3. Emma in the Night by Wendy Walker
4. Bad Girl Gone by Temple Matthews
5. Ten Dead Comedians by Fred Van Lente
6. Doctor Who: The Pirate Planet by James Goss
7. Vicious by V.E. Schwaub
8. Mississippi Blood by Greg Iles
9. It by Stephen King (re-read)
10. The Waking Fire by Anthony Ryan

That should keep me busy this summer! And, of course, there will be reading to Shortcake so she can get prizes too!

Review: The Magicians by Lev Grossman

For most of his life, Quentin Coldwater has used the Fillory (think Narnia) books to escape the doldrums of his everyday life. Now at the age of seventeen, Quentin has been given a chance he never dreamed he had — magic is real and he can become a magician.

Instead of heading to a mundane, normal college, he enlists at Brakebills, a university of magic and begins training. The one thing the books never included was that becoming a Magician is difficult, tedious work and nowhere nearly as exciting as depicted in the novels.

Lev Grossman’s The Magicians follows Quentin and a group of students during the course of their studies at Brakebill’s. Rather than having one book equal one year of Quentin’s life, we’re treated to the highlights of his magical training — from the semester spent in Antartica to the rather odd magical game played among his school and others. The episodic nature of Grossman’s novel ensures that Quentin and the reader never get entirely comfortable with how things are going, including when Quentin and his love interest Alice test out of some of the first year and are moved up to second year early.