This is a confusing book to rate because it's definitely a four star book, but that doesn't mean I liked it. It made me think and feel and hate and want to scream and it was an excellent book, but I'm not sure if that means that I liked it in the strictest sense.
It was, in many ways, a book about the betrayal of fantasy - about Susan Pevensie and all the kids who never go to Hogwarts; a book about all the myths in fantasy that sneak under the radar - the hero as everyman, the good versus evil dichotomy, the idea that everyone is okay in the end. It's a response to Narnia on an emotional level (rather than Pullman's philosophical response in His Dark Materials).
And I loved it for being dark and gritty and horrible and hated it at the same time, because it was a darkness not only inimical to fantasy as I remember it, but to the real world as well. It's a familiar angst to anyone who has ever been between the ages of 13 and 30 and a world that bears out that angst is almost as surreal as one in which it doesn't exist.
This is not a book about the real world, it's a book about shattering the rules of fantasy, even those rules that are true outside of fantasy as well.
But it was still awesome.
The characters were deliciously fun to love and hate, even when they subverted archetypes, they felt familiar. You knew exactly who they weren't. Brakebills, the wizarding school, was equally fun and very well thought out.
My only real complaint is that it felt like two completely different stories were crushed together to make one narrative, but that don't necessarily fit together. Part one and Part two never quite felt like an organic whole.
Otherwise, it was a great read and I'm looking forward to the sequel. Even if I still want to punch Grossman in the face, just a little, for writing the anti-fantasy.