I stumbled across this while prowling through Amazon recommendations, and it sounded intriguing, so I downloaded a sample to my Kindle. I read the sample last night and got the rest of the book post-haste, and have been reading it more or less all day, while waiting at the doctors' office and on a car trip and such.

I'm now halfway through it, and am suffused with "Why haven't I heard of this before?"

It's a real treat—an author I've never read before (never heard of, in fact), but right from the start I feel like I'm in good hands, being told a story worth telling by someone who knows what he's doing, who writes in his own voice, not an attempt at being someone else, and who has great confidence, playing with genre expectations, subverting them where he feels like it and fulfilling them where he feels like it.

It's set largely in New York, so far, so it has an urban fantasy flavor to parts of it, but since much of the action (again, so far) takes place at a hidden magical location that no one can reach but magician types, it also feels like hidden- or secondary-world material. It's chock full of well-written magic that's credibly strange and transporting and magical. It's the story of a kid who goes off to a secret magic school to become a magician, but it seems to have been written from the point of view that the Harry Potter books are unrealistic twee childish twaddle, and if there really was a school of magic, it would feel like X, and the kids in it would act like Y, and there'd be sense and logic to the magic as well as wonder. There's even a magical sport/game, but it makes quidditch seem terribly mundane. And it's all written beautifully, with magic that feels like magic and alienation that feels like alienation and a sense of wonder grounded in young characters who drink too much and have sex and fall in and out of friendship and wonder what the hell they're going to do with their lives.

There's a secondary plot—or, well, I expect it's about to become the primary plot for the second half of the book—about a series of Narnia-like books that turn out to be real and we'll discover that the magical otherworld has fallen on hard times since the books were published and our lead will have to do something about it, but aside from a lot of hints and portents, that hasn't really started up yet so I can't say much about it other than that halfway through the book I feel like I've already gotten a book's work of story, so the idea that there's yet more coming is a delight.

It's described in some of the Amazon reviews as "Harry Potter for adults," but I wouldn't say that—it's not adult so much as not-YA; it's too straightforward about sex and booze and the idea that adulthood isn't a resolution of anything to be comfortably YA, but it's still very much about young people figuring out how to be adults. It's sort of what Harry Potter might be if the basic idea had been filtered through the mind of filmmaker Richard Linklater; a well-executed blend of classic YA fantasy ideas with a semi-literary coming-of-age novel.

It might crash and burn in the second half, but given how good the first half has been, I'm expecting something good.