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The Magicians
The Magicians by Lev Grossman is $2.99! I haven’t read this book yet, but it comes highly recommended from several friends. It also is the most recommended book I’ve seen for people looking for what to read next after finishing the Harry Potter series. Though the protagonist is a senior high school, the book does contain themes of sex and drugs. Something to keep in mind for younger readers.
A thrilling and original coming-of-age novel about a young man practicing magic in the real world
Quentin Coldwater is brilliant but miserable. A senior in high school, he’s still secretly preoccupied with a series of fantasy novels he read as a child, set in a magical land called Fillory. Imagine his surprise when he finds himself unexpectedly admitted to a very secret, very exclusive college of magic in upstate New York, where he receives a thorough and rigorous education in the craft of modern sorcery.
He also discovers all the other things people learn in college: friendship, love, sex, booze, and boredom. Something is missing, though. Magic doesn’t bring Quentin the happiness and adventure he dreamed it would. After graduation he and his friends make a stunning discovery: Fillory is real. But the land of Quentin’s fantasies turns out to be much darker and more dangerous than he could have imagined. His childhood dream becomes a nightmare with a shocking truth at its heart.
At once psychologically piercing and magnificently absorbing, The Magicians boldly moves into uncharted literary territory, imagining magic as practiced by real people, with their capricious desires and volatile emotions. Lev Grossman creates an utterly original world in which good and evil aren’t black and white, love and sex aren’t simple or innocent, and power comes at a terrible price.
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Her Perfect Mate
Her Perfect Mate by Paige Tyler is $1.99! This is a paranormal romance with a Special Forces hero and a shifter heroine, and I’m all sorts of intrigued. Readers felt that this was a good start to the X-Ops series with great world-building. However, some said the romance fell flat compared to everything else. Any members of the Bitchery care to comment?
Their attraction is more dangerous than any weapon of mass destruction
When Special Forces Captain Landon Donovan is chosen for an assignment with the Department of Covert Operations, he’s stunned to find his new partner is a beautiful woman who looks like she couldn’t hurt a fly, much less take down a terrorist.
Ivy Halliwell isn’t your average covert op. Her feline DNA means she can literally bring out the claws when things get dicey. She isn’t thrilled to be paired with yet another military grunt, but Landon is different. He doesn’t think she’s a freak-and he’s smokin’ hot. Soon they’re facing a threat even greater than anyone imagines… and an animal magnetism impossible to ignore.
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Slow Hand
Slow Hand by Victoria Vane is 99c! This is a contemporary western romance, though some readers on Goodreads have labeled it as erotica. The hero is a favorite amongst the reviews, while the heroine seemed to toe the line between independent and just plain bitchy. It has a 3.9-star rating on Goodreads and is the first book in the Hot Cowboy Nights series.
In rural Montana…
Wade Knowlton is a hardworking lawyer who’s torn between his small-town Montana law practice and a struggling family ranch. He’s on the brink of exhaustion from trying to save everybody and everything, when gorgeous Nicole Powell walks into his office. She’s a damsel in distress and the breath of fresh air he needs.Even the lawyers wear boots…
Nicole Powell is a sassy Southern girl who has officially sworn off cowboys after a spate of bad seeds-until her father’s death sends her to Montana and into the arms of a man who seems too good to be true. Her instincts tell her to high tail it out of Montana, but she can’t resist a cowboy with a slow hand…Add to Goodreads To-Read List →
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Hot Head
Hot Head by Damon Suede is $1 at Amazon, and hopefully it’ll be price matched elsewhere! This is a M/M romance between two firefights and good lord, look at that cover. Readers warn of, or rather praise, the emotional plot and the steamy sexy. It has a 4.1-star rating on Goodreads. There’s also a kilt…
Where there’s smoke, there’s fire…
Since 9/11, Brooklyn firefighter Griff Muir has wrestled with impossible feelings for his best friend and partner at Ladder 181, Dante Anastagio. Unfortunately, Dante is strictly a ladies’ man, and the FDNY isn’t exactly gay-friendly. For ten years, Griff has hidden his heart in a half-life of public heroics and private anguish.
Griff’s caution and Dante’s cockiness make them an unbeatable team. To protect his buddy, there’s nothing Griff wouldn’t do… until a nearly bankrupt Dante proposes the worst possible solution: HotHead.com, a gay porn website where uniformed hunks get down and dirty. And Dante wants them to appear there—together. Griff may have to guard his heart and live out his darkest fantasies on camera. Can he rescue the man he loves without wrecking their careers, their families, or their friendship?
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I think I’m the only person on the planet who didn’t like The Magicians. I found it deeply cynical and too derivative of Harry Potter and Narnia.
I didn’t like The Magicians for the cynicism either, though I don’t know that I’d call it derivative.
A trifecta: I couldn’t even finish THE MAGICIANS. Now I don’t feel so alone.
**Full disclosure** SyFy is doing a series based on The Magicians and my brother has a part.
I finished The Magicians last night and my feelings were mixed about it. I REALLY wanted to love it since my brother is involved in the TV show, but the whole time I kept thinking, “What is the point of all this???”
I wanted to punch Quentin in the face, repeatedly. What a whiny, self-absorbed asshole!!! And the rest of the “gang”, save Alice, was even worse.
I will say that even though I probably should have realized it sooner, the true identity of The Beast did surprise me.
And I want a Humbledrum.
D
Oh good, it wasn’t just me then! 😀
The Damon Suede M/M $1 special is also part of the dollar titles featured in the Dreamspinner webite. More than 20 titles, normally 6.99, featured at 1.00. Worth the visit to their website. Some really good deals.
Hot Head comes very highly recommended by me. Although both main characters behaved in a distinctly boneheaded manner at times, I stayed involved with them, and Griff is a great point-of-view character (third person but his perspective only). One thing I really liked about the book was that it didn’t end at the “I love you”, but went on to explore how they’d learn to function as a couple and stay together.
Add me to the list of people who pretty much wanted only scenes with Alice in The Magicians. I absolutely loathed Quentin, and kept reading mainly because I kept waiting for the great revelation of why so many people were raving about the book. I liked the sequel a bit more, but not enough to have picked up the final book of the series yet.
A $1 for Hot Head is so totally worth it. Loads of angst if that’s your cat nip!
Also thanks for the heads up about Dreamspinner, Judy!
I didn’t care for “The Magicians,” although I have friends who rave about it. I was not happy with the role of the female character, although I can’t remember why. It was a book that went in one ear and other the other for me.
Loved “Hot Head,” though.
Also couldn’t stand the Magicians, and also for reasons mentioned above. I loved the idea of it, but ugh, the characters (except for Alice) were horrible.
If you know what’s good for you, read Hot Head pronto!
I also loathed The Magicians and couldn’t finish it. The main character was horrible, and the female characters seemed to only exist in relation to him and were only good people if they were willing to sleep with him.
My brother (the one who was teaching programming at the local college when he was 14) loves The Magicians and calls it the anti-Potter. I read it and enjoyed much of it though Quentin, and a few of the others, did need slapping. There were nice ideas and imagery in it and fairly good writing. However, it seemed a little cynical, as if it were pandering to those who wanted an anti-Potter.
I am about 10% into Hot Head and really enjoying it so far. Had to put it down to regroup after the description of 9/11, the writing is quite visceral. As someone used to reading m/m written by women, this is quite a revelation – the phrase ‘out getting his bone waxed by some girl’ made me snort tea up my nose and wince at the same time. And then I realised that guys think of waxing and associate it with cars, not hair removal, so. Um.
My people! A friend loves the Magicians and strongly recommended it to me, as he knew it covered the topics I enjoy. I tried, but I can’t read books where I want horrible things to happen to the narrator/main character from page 2 on. He later asked me what I thought and I told him, “I want to punch Quentin repeatedly in the face.” To which he responded, “Fair.”
I struggled to finish Hot Head when I read it. I loved the character of Grif and his emotional journey was powerful to watch. What I didn’t like was that Dante asked him to do the video on hot heads and Grif absolutely did not want to. He ended up in a situation where he felt that in order to save someone he loved he had to do something he was very much against. It had a sour note of exploitation that very much turned me off. Other people might feel differently. But the way Dante got Grif to do the video and Grif’s reaction to it was an issue I had a lot of problems with.
Is the hero of that Paige Tyler book seriously named *Landon Donovan*?! She’s not much of a soccer fan, I guess.
Caspelet, I actually agree with you, except that it didn’t ruin the book for me. Dante did several things that left me thinking that it was a damn good thing that Grif was understanding and forgiving. But that’s kind of what I meant about being glad that the book went on for a bunch of chapters after they became a couple. For Dante to guilt Grif into making porn with him because he couldn’t simply say straight out that he just wanted to sleep with him was WTF — but symptomatic of an extreme difficulty communicating (on both sides, really). When they finally do reveal their feelings, they have a long conversation, and say no more not talking and making assumptions about the other person — and then the story shows them putting that into practice and getting better and better at it. So that saves it, I think, because even if they (especially Dante) kind of screwed up, they’re shown learning, so it’s convincing that their relationship can actually work.
I’m another person who thoroughly loathed The Magicians! I rarely want to climb into a book for the express purpose of punching every single member of the cast, but I wanted to in this case.
Behold, my rant on this very topic from 2001:
http://www.angelahighland.com/2011/12/25/book-log-38-the-magicians-by-lev-grossman/
Er, from 2011, that is! My bad!
Vasha, I agree with you. I’m really glad I read the book, and I liked the ending. But the problem with Dante guilting Grif into porn wasn’t addressed enough for me. Dante does start to redeem himself, but without his point of view I was left unsatisfied that he knew what he did was wrong and why. I think I wanted more grovelling to come from Dante to really resolve the issue. This book is definitely worth reading though, both for the good writing and the story itself.
Casplet, do men normally grovel to other men? Dante apologized, Griff accepted. Seemed like a normal man/man relationship to me.
Well, there’s a great big swath of male culture in this country where firstly, men don’t talk about their feelings, and secondly, gay sex would be more acceptable for money than because you want to — that’s messed up, but it’s the truth. Griff understands Dante because he knows exactly where he’s coming from.
I loved The Magicians and read all three books. As everyone says above: Quentin is awful. He’s also not even interestingly or amusingly awful – he has very little charm, and you spend most of the book wishing it was more about Alice, or Julia.
But I found Quentin truthful in a way that a lot of fantasy heroes with the same origin stories aren’t, and that was enough to make him interesting for me. Becoming magic didn’t automatically make him heroic, and Quentin desperately wanted to be the hero. And because he knew so much about how the hero’s story was supposed to work, he felt betrayed and lost.
Dianna @ #25:
Since you’ve read the whole trilogy, would you say that Quentin eventually actually becomes heroic? Because that’s one of the things that drove me nuts about the character, at least in the first book. He showed no actual signs of growth or eventual nobility, or that he even learned anything from his experiences aside from “life completely sucks and is meaningless”, and yeah well I found that rather depressing, really.
I’ve also _just now_ realized that the relationship wangst drove me nuts in the same way the Big Misunderstanding trope does in romances–i.e., swaths and swaths of pages of conflict that could have been avoided if the people involved would have just talked honestly to one another for _five freggin’ minutes_.
I had an interesting discussion with a local friend of mine about the book, a guy who also liked it in a general “excellent deconstruction of tropes” kind of way. And I will allow that yes, there is plenty of trope deconstruction to be had here. I’m not saying Grossman sucks as a writer–indeed, he does have a powerful enough command of the language and of the structure of the work that I did in fact keep reading until the end of the book. So I do have to give him credit for that.
But a well-written book about characters I unilaterally want to punch can only impress me so far. 😉
Men do grovel to each other when they really screw up. Sometimes they need alcohol to do so because it’s hard, but it still happens. Even the ones who don’t show emotion or are brought up to be “manly” will grovel and suck up if they know they did wrong and care enough about the other person. Sometimes it is as simple as saying sorry and meaning it, but I don’t believe it when Dante says it in this book because I don’t think he knows why what he did was wrong. We only get Grif’s viewpoint, so we don’t get into Dante’s head and that could be part of the disconnect. As for gay sex for money vs pleasure, yep, sometimes guys do find it easier to understand being paid. I don’t think that’s Dante’s view though. He needed money. He needed Grif’s help to get more money. Then after they do hot heads together, Dante realizes he has feelings for Grif. Dante working through being gay with Grif was well done, and I liked that part. I just didn’t like him exploiting Grif in order to get the money he needed.
Well, you may have read this book more recently than I have, but I’ve read it twice, and that’s not my recollection of what Dante said — he said he’d been wanting Grif for years, and came up with a “cunning plan” for how to get him naked, and the money was only an excuse.
I went back and looked it up. Dante actually says both. The night before, he says after hot heads he sees Grif differently. The next morning Dante says he’s been in love with Grif for six months. I didn’t pick up on that when I read it a couple months ago.
It’s been years since I read The Magicians, but I loved it. I think it’s likely because I am fairly cynical but it really got at some of the questions that I have about the Potter universe. Quentin was awful but I really think that was kind of the point.
By the way, thanks for the discussion!
Thanks to you too! I’ve got to go back and re-read that book now. 🙂
Late to the party, but I’ll chime in with my opinion on Hot Head, which seems to be one of those books you either love or hate. I kind of hated it – the writing style was not to my taste, I thought the plot and the writing were over the top and all over the place and I had trouble accepting the basic premise. But it was very compelling and the visceral writing did pull me in, even though it also annoyed me.