Chortling Smugly and Rolling Their Eyes

Christian Kriticos considers Louis Sachar’s “The Magician of Tiger Castle,” the children’s author’s “first novel for adults.”

By Christian KriticosSeptember 4, 2025

• SF

DOES MAGIC EXIST TODAY? Often in our modern, rational world, it seems as if all the mysteries of the supernatural have been explained away—replaced by the precise reason of science. Take the transformation of sand into glass. Few of us can really explain how that process works. But that doesn’t mean we leap to assume it’s some alchemical miracle. Rather, we turn to the experts, who nod and reassure us that this implausible phenomenon indeed follows the documented scientific rules of the universe.

In this way, we live in a unique moment. Throughout history, “science and magic were virtually indistinguishable”—even in eras such as the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, when logic and reason were in ascendancy. This observation opens The Magician of Tiger Castle (2025). It’s the latest novel by Louis Sachar, the acclaimed children’s author best known for his National Book Award winner Holes (1998). And it is his first work for adults.

Sachar’s story is set in Europe in 1523—the very heart of the Renaissance. It was a time when technological breakthroughs like gunpowder and the mariner’s compass were transforming society, even if the science behind them was not yet fully understood. Sachar’s narrator and protagonist is Anatole, a middle-aged court magician who develops potions to cure everything from infections to morning sickness. But the reader soon realizes that although Anatole is labeled a magician, he is also a scientist. He is simply one with a different language from that we use today. Instead of bacteria, his potions target “evil spirits.” But his methods are the same.

For instance, we learn that one of Anatole’s most successful potions is his “bread mold soup,” which can cure gangrenous wounds and “strangling sickness” (the bacterial infection diphtheria). The implication is that Anatole’s healing potion is not magical at all. Rather, he has accidentally discovered antibiotics 400 years before Alexander Fleming’s breakthrough experiments with penicillin, a bacteria-killing mold that grows naturally on bread. Similarly, Anatole extols the virtues of drinking ale, noting it is “safer than water.” This too has a scientific explanation. As he clarifies, “While we didn’t know about bacteria, we understood the benefits of fermentation.”

Mixed in with these scientific rationales, there is also magic in the book that defies logical explanation. For instance, Anatole is only able to draw a link between bacteria and fermentation because of the book’s modern-day frame narrative. From the outset, we learn that the magician is telling his story from the present day, making him well over 500 years old—the result of an immortality potion he perfected by experimenting on mice. The central plot of the novel also revolves around potions that cannot be explained by science.

The story begins in Esquaveta—a place the reader will never have heard of, but which Sachar ensures us was one of the great kingdoms of Europe. This fantasy realm is “on the verge of bankruptcy.” To turn its fortunes around, the king proposes an alliance, offering his daughter as a bride for the prince of prosperous neighboring kingdom Oxatania. (That name is reminiscent of the real historical Occitania, further blurring the lines between fantasy and reality in Sachar’s narrative.) However, when the princess falls for a lowly scribe, the arranged marriage is put in jeopardy. It is here that Anatole comes in. He is ordered by the king to create a pair of magic potions—first, a “memory potion” to erase the scribe from the princess’s mind, and second, a “love potion” to secure her devotion to the Oxatanian prince.

Sachar relishes describing the improbable ingredients Anatole draws on to concoct these potions: “dried dragonflies, alligator organs, snake venom.” For some of these, we are given a scientific rationale—a proposed potion to secure the princess’s compliance using “poppy tears” clearly alludes to opium. But others sit more firmly in the world of magic and folklore. For example, we learn that a love potion requires “an odd number of daisy petals,” as well as “a personal identifier” to ensure the correct subject is targeted. A tear works best. But a drop of sweat will do in a pinch.

By mixing what many readers will interpret as a distinction between the rational and the fantastical, Sachar suggests an ambiguity around the categorizations of science and magic. Placing the immortal Anatole as the book’s narrator allows a dual perspective that accentuates these blurred lines. Having lived in both the Renaissance and the modern day, Anatole argues that “Aristotle’s elements are just as true and just as false as the modern periodic table. It is a matter of how one chooses to divide and categorize.”

Such an assertion may seem ludicrous to us. The periodic table orders elements based on facts: the quantity of protons in their nuclei determines the position of each element on the table, and that arrangement is justified by the observation of trends based on these atomic numbers. But Anatole argues that our modern certainty in systems like these is just as flawed as the 16th-century certainty that leeches could “extract bad blood.” After all, if we defined or ordered elements based on different factors, might we not observe different trends? Anatole invites us to “remember that every generation believes themselves to be living in modern times. Future generations will be chortling smugly and rolling their eyes when they learn about the beliefs of the twenty-first century.” Just as we might chortle at Anatole’s leeches.

That theme of uncertainty and ambiguous categorization also extends outside the novel. Since the book is marketed as Sachar’s first work for adults, it naturally raises questions about how we define and categorize literature for different age groups. In an interview with People last year, Sachar confessed that the novel began with his usual young adult audience in mind. In the early writing stages, he believed the plot would focus on the teenage characters of the princess and the scribe. “I was in the middle of the third draft, when it became clear to me that Anatole had nudged his way into the center of the story,” he explained. “Well, it’s not a good idea to have a 40-year-old man, desperate to save his career, as the main character of a book for young people, so I decided to refocus and turn this into a novel for adults.”

However, aside from the main character being “a 40-year-old-man” (actually a 540-year-old man if we remember the frame narrative), it’s not clear what makes this an adult novel. The story is written in the familiar style of Sachar’s books for children, favoring short sentences, paragraphs, and chapters. It even follows the exact same structure as Holes, consisting of two long sections followed by a final, shorter one, which serves as an epilogue of sorts.

A child audience also seems implicit in Sachar’s tendency to explain his many allusions to classical figures and famous names from Renaissance Europe. For instance, at one point, a character mentions “Leonardo.” Rather than leaving the reference to stand, Sachar states the obvious by clarifying that “he was referring to Leonardo da Vinci.” In a voice clearly accustomed to addressing a younger audience, he adds: “Just thought I ought to point that out in case it slipped past you.”

In terms of content, the only passage that might be inappropriate for children is a section of ribald banter in which several characters speculate on the princess’s wedding night. “She welcomed the prince with open arms and an open heart,” one says. “And open legs!” another adds. The novel also contains some violence—the titular tiger, which lives in the castle’s dry moat, feeds regularly on those who have displeased the king. But none of this is any more graphic than Holes, a novel in which characters are shot, slashed, and bludgeoned across the face with shovels. Indeed, if Holes and The Magician of Tiger Castle are stripped to their plots, it is the former that sounds more like what we imagine a novel for adults to be about: one is an intergenerational saga set in a Texas correctional facility; the other is a fantasy story of castles, magicians, princesses, and love potions.

Although genres are not so strictly tied to specific age groups today, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, most fantasy novels were marketed toward children. Upsetting that traditional genre and age association seems to be part of Sachar’s point. “Whether others call my work fantasy, absurdism, surrealism, magical reality or something else is unimportant,” he told People. Perhaps aligning genres to specific age groups is just as absurd to Sachar as separating science and magic is to Anatole.

Maybe, then, it is that very sense of ambiguity that makes The Magician of Tiger Castle an adult novel. Sachar’s children’s books are characterized by their precise plotting and neatly tied-up endings—the final section of his most famous novel is titled “Filling In the Holes.” But his new book is not like that at all. Throughout the story, much is made of Anatole’s propensity to trip, fall, and fumble wherever he goes. And the plot is much like that too—stumbling and pivoting from one direction to another before coming to a fairly abrupt end, leaving the fate of the principal characters up in the air and various holes unfilled.

Just as we are left with these ambiguities around the plot, the ending also leaves readers with unanswered questions about the nature of reality. It’s never explained exactly how Anatole achieves immortality. And the mysteries of where his science ends and his magic begins are never revealed. The closest we get to an answer is in one of Anatole’s many polemics against 21st-century thinking. In the passage in question, he criticizes the modern categorization of vitamins into lettered groups. Just as there are infinite tones between each note on a musical scale, Anatole argues that there also exists “an infinite variety of qualities and benefits found between the vitamins A, B, C, D, and E.” It is within these in-between zones—where science cannot probe, so he suggests—that the magic of his potions lies.

If Sachar’s children’s novels give us answers, then The Magician of Tiger Castle leaves us with questions. Being in the company of the Renaissance man Anatole for some 300 pages has us doubting our 21st-century certainty. Living today, in what we call an age of reason, can we truly say that magic doesn’t exist? Science may have opened our eyes to various discoveries, as Anatole accepts. But perhaps it has also blinded us to those in-between spaces. What mysteries lie between each element on the periodic table, for example? What secrets are hiding between the letters of the vitamins? We may never know, Sachar ultimately suggests. Once upon a time, a clumsy magician might have been able to stumble accidentally into those hidden zones. But with the guardrails of science now firmly in place, can we still access those in-between spaces today? Or is the magic lost forever?