I never liked Holden Caulfield. Crucify me if you must, but I did make the mistake of reading Catcher in the Rye as an adult, with adult sense and sensibilities. So I was really not sympathetic to Holden Caulfield at Hogwarts and I’m certainly not taking Holden Caulfield’s shit in Narnia either. Quentin (the Holdeness of all Caulfields) and his band of self-adsorbed fellow magicians now reign in Fillory (it really is Narnia adjacent) as self-adsorbed despots. Grossman loves to play with genres and tropes, but I […]
C’mon, Luv. Let’s Go Do Druggy Sex Magic!
[Sound the Second Novel Alarm! Spoilers for The Magicians ahead. I mean it this time.] The Magicians was an exercise in literary frustration for me. I loved it. It was wonderful. Its adherence to explaining away its every mystery absolutely infuriated me. Reading it a second time allowed me to be well aware that the breathtakingly horrific things that occurred in the unfurling of Lev Grossman’s fantasy novel cioppino would not remain the unexplainable night terrors of a magical world beyond our reckoning and to simply enjoy the […]