Never Be Bored
29 May 2020
A+ in Applied Magics
Beanstalk by E. Jade Lomax. The Magicians tv show; Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire; The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin.
Okay HP fans, this one's for you. In today's class, we'll be discussing magical education systems in literature—classic and more modern interpretations. We'll look at stories of schools, for young children through graduate students, to explore the popular "magic school" trope and consider how each work has its own unique twist on fantastical academia.
Beanstalk by E. Jade Lomax incorporates familiar fairy tale elements while having fun with the whole idea of Becoming a Hero and Going on an Adventure. It's a well-written, playful story created with love for the fantasy genre, full of interesting characters, and at its heart, a group of friends. Of course, they didn't quite start out that way. Jack Farris (guide), S. Grey (studying sagework), Laney Jones (mage), and Rupert Willington Jons Hammerfeld the Seventh (hero major) don't even like each other much when they end up in the same Academy study group. But there's nothing like a little secrecy and danger to jumpstart a friendship.
If you're a fan of Dungeons & Dragons, you'll love this book, the first of a trilogy, all available to download for free from the author's website.
See also: Elsewhere University from Strange and Yet Familiar.
One unusual characteristic of The Magicians is that the characters are much older than most magic school story students—Brakebills University offers a graduate degree program (which, added bonus, neatly sidesteps the common failing of magic schools to address why these young students aren't learning things like math). If you liked The Chronicles of Narnia but wouldn't mind something quite a bit darker and mysterious, definitely give this show, currently on Netflix, a try.
Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children in Every Heart a Doorway (the first in an ongoing series) turns the magic school trope upside down. It isn't a school to teach children magic, it's a refuge for those children who don't have magic anymore, who once-upon-a-time fell into fairyland, lived, learned, grew up, and then for one reason or another fell back out. How are you supposed to deal with middle school when you've lead the Queen's Army against the Goblin King's Horde? Plus there's both ace and trans representation, which you don't see in young adult fantasy, basically ever.
Only one of the three intertwined plots of The Fifth Season deals with the Fulcrum, the order has been training individuals to manipulate energy to create seismic events for over a thousand years, but I'm including it here anyway because I love this series so much. One unique aspect I adore is the awareness of time—this book makes it clear just how long this world has existed. Unlike so many fantasy stories where the time period is ambiguous, the Broken Earth trilogy is grounded in thousands of years of lore.
Like I said, it's a popular trope. Compare these against more typical magic school examples such as those in The Witcher tv show, The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss, and of course Harry Potter by J. K. Rowling.