C.S. Lewis once wrote that “we read to know we’re not alone.” I don’t know how true this is for everyone, but it is certainly true for me. As a child, and as a teenager, I always felt very isolated and cut off from the real world, and so I voraciously, rapaciously devoured fantasy book after fantasy book. It wasn’t conscious, but I was trying to find, in some fashion, the world that I belonged in, the people that I felt a part of. I was looking, most of all, for a sign that someone else understood me, that I was not alone in this world. And yet at the end of every book, I was unsatisfied, still adrift, somehow yet hollow. Fantasy was like a sugary treat for my soul: it was delicious, it compelled me to eat more of it, and yet it contained nothing to sustain me.

Lev Grossman’s book The Magicians may initially seem to be a cheap ripoff of the Harry Potter series: a young man who doesn’t quite fit in discovers he has a talent for sorcery, and is whisked out of the “real world” into a university that trains magicians. Based on this synopsis, one might think Grossman is attempting to milk the cash cow that J.K. Rowling birthed. Upon further reading, however, one realizes that nothing could be further from the truth. Grossman is not plagiarizing Harry Potter; he is responding to it. He is responding, as well, to Lewis’s Narnia series, and in a sense to all fantasy. He is writing to those of us who share that love of fantasy, who hunt for something not quite definable in its pages, and who are always disappointed. He is writing to let us know we are not alone.

The book tells the story of Quentin Coldwater, who in his final year of high school finds himself recruited by a very exclusive college, one that trains magicians. Quentin has always had a deep and abiding love for fantasy, having grown up with the Fillory novels — a series of children’s books that are an obvious analogue to the Narnia books, but might just as well refer to any fantasy series for children. Of course, he leaps at the chance to live in this fantasy world and learn how to work real magic. In the course of his education, however, Quentin learns that fantasy is not all it’s cracked up to be. This is not the childish world of the books he has read; this is an adult world. People are dysfunctional, sometimes cruel. They have sex, they drink, they do drugs. Magic, far from being easy to learn, is excruciatingly and frustratingly difficult — and sometimes it is dangerous and terrifying. The book does not stop with Quentin’s first year of education, nor even his full term at college; it follows him through graduation and out into the world, where he seeks to find a place for himself. Eventually Quentin finds out that Fillory itself is a real place, and becomes determined to make his way there, but even Fillory is not quite what he imagined.

Even without its resonant underlying themes, The Magicians is a fantastic story, a page-turner from beginning to end, and though Quentin may not always be likable, he is at least believable and always sympathetic. The imagination and adventure in this book are enough to recommend it on their own. But the real thrust of the book is in Quentin’s relationship with fantasy, and consequently the reader’s own: what do we look for in fantasy? Why are we looking for it? What would it mean to us if we found it? Grossman cuts through the psyche of the reader to get at the dark little heart of our yearning cores, to prod at the dissatisfaction and isolation that prompts us to read in the first place. In doing so, he writes an arc for Quentin that is sometimes uncomfortable, but ultimately satisfying. I have, in all my years of reading, never reached the ending of a fantasy novel that felt so right, so rewarding and fulfilling.

This is a must-read for anyone who has ever longed for another place or time.

And as an addendum for those out there of the furry persuasion, this book has plenty to keep you interested as well. I can say no more, lest I ruin it, but you will know it when you get there.