Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I have thought long and hard about what to say about this book. I began it after watching a some of the episodes of the TV show, and I'm sad to report this is one case where the show is far, far better than the book ever managed to be. Objectively, there is little wrong with the book itself. The writing is, for the most part, decent, even if the author has the infuriating tendency to tell, not show. Yes, the pacing manages to be laborious, even when skipping months at a time, but other books have that problem and still manage to be decent. The fundamental problem of this book is that nothing happens. At all. There's something to be said for a book exploring the life of the everyman, to whom nothing of import happens, instead of a mythic hero, but that's not what's going on here. Many things - wonderful things - happen to the main character, Q. He learns magic, travels to other worlds, falls in love but, throughout it all, he rejects them. Nothing is good enough for him. His magic isn't magical enough. His lover is boring. And so he continues to tell himself he's meant for something better, all he while failing to live up to what minor expectations are put on him at all. There is no character growth. Q remains the whiny, entitled, depressed child he was at the beginning of the book, only with a whole host of new, wonderful things to go on about, at the end. He lauds himself for making such good choices and goes off and does the opposite for no adequately explored reason. He tells himself he's better than everyone and fails to see he's the least of them, even after encountering gods and genuinely decent people. If anything, he revels in the depression this causes him, almost to the point of glorifying untreated mental illness. The characters with the most potential are hardly explored at all, with most appearing to be written out by the end of the book. The "villain" - indeed, the overarching "plot" itself - seems like an afterthought, as if the author wrote a book about your average wizard and realized he needed an actual reason for someone to read it. Indeed, the author uses the "villain"'s appearance at the end of the novel as a chance to be preachy, going on about how getting what you want is awful because it always ends up badly, and how having emotions is terrible because you might get hurt, tacked on as if an afterthought. None of this even begins to touch the magical worlds the author has built. Rather than being a "Hogwarts for adults", as advertised, we are given a magical college that somehow manages to be more dull than any real college ever attended, and people who are, to varying degrees, obsessed with a slightly less Christian allegory version of Narnia. Neither are flushed out to anything close to the degree Hogwarts (or Middle Earth or Narnia) was, so that instead of a "magical world that feels real" that could have possibly redeemed the rest of the book, we get a suggestion of a magical world as seen through fogged glasses from a distance. In short, I have never encountered anything that was such a waste of time. I can't even bring myself to properly hate the book because there is nothing, fundamentally, to hate. It just is. And for that reason alone it becomes the new #1 on my "Books Never To Read Again And Keep The Rest Of The World From Reading At All Costs" list, above books I've outright loathed, because there is nothing to enjoy and even less to hate.