The Magicians by Lev Grossman

last night, you are at the Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy.” The butler arrived with a tray crowded with covered dishes, which he busily uncovered, like a room-service waiter. “Based on your performance in the Examination yesterday, we’ve decided to offer you a place here. Try the bacon, it’s very good. Local farm, they raise the pigs on cream and walnuts.”
    “You want me to go to school here. College.”
    “Yes. You’d come here instead of matriculating at a conventional university. If you like it, you can even keep the room you stayed in last night.”
    “But I can’t just—” Quentin didn’t know exactly how to put everything that was ridiculous about that idea in a single sentence. “I’m sorry, this is a little confusing. So I would put off college?”
    “No, Quentin. You wouldn’t put off college. You would abandon college. Brakebills would be your college.” The Dean had obviously had a lot of practice at this. “There would be no Ivy League for you. You wouldn’t go off to school with the rest of your class. You would never make Phi Beta Kappa or be recruited by a hedge fund or a management consultancy. This isn’t summer school, Quentin. This is”—he pronounced the phrase precisely, eyes wide—“ ‘the whole shebang.’ ”
    “So it’s four years—”
    “Five, actually.”
    “—at the end of which I get what? A bachelor’s of magic?” It was actually funny. “I can’t believe I’m having this conversation,” he said to nobody.
    “At the end of which you will be a magician, Quentin. It is not the obvious career path, I know. Your guidance counselor would not approve. No one will know what you’re doing here. You would be leaving all that behind. Your friends, whatever career plans you had, everything. You would be losing one world but gaining another. Brakebills would become your world. It’s not a decision to be taken lightly.”
    Well, no, it wasn’t. Quentin pushed his plate away and crossed his arms. He stalled.
    “So, how did you find me?”
    “Oh, we have a device for that, a globe.” Fogg indicated a shelf holding a whole menagerie of them: modern globes; blackwater globes; pale lunar globes; glittering midnight-blue celestial globes; dark, smoky, unreadable globes awash with ludicrously inaccurate continents. “It finds young people like yourself who have an aptitude for magic—essentially it senses magic being performed, often inadvertently, by unregistered sorcerers, of which you are one. I suppose it must have picked up that Wandering Nickel trick of yours.
    “We have scouts, too,” he added. “Your odd friend Ricky with the whiskers is one.” He touched his jawline where Ricky’s Amish beard was.
    “What about that woman I met, with the braids. The paramedic. Was she a scout, too?”
    Fogg frowned. “With braids? You saw her?”
    “Well, yes. Right before I came here. Didn’t you send her?”
    Fogg’s face became studiously empty.
    “In a manner of speaking. She’s a special case. Works on an independent basis. Freelance, you might say.”
    Quentin’s mind spun. Maybe he should ask to see a brochure. And no one had said anything about tuition yet. And gift horses and all that notwithstanding, how much did he know about this place? Suppose it really was a school for magic. Was it any good? What if he’d stumbled into some third-tier magic college by accident? He had to think practically. He didn’t want to be committing himself to some community college of sorcery when he could have Magic Harvard or whatever.
    “Don’t you want to see my SATs?”
    “I have,” Fogg said patiently. “And a lot more than that. But yesterday’s Exam was all we really needed. It’s very comprehensive. Admission here is quite competitive, you know. I doubt there’s a more exclusive school of any kind on the continent. We held six Exams this summer, for twenty places. Only two Passed yesterday, you and another boy, the boy with the tattoos and the