The book itself is about a high school senior who goes to an interview for college and instead finds the interviewer dead, and a piece of paper telling him about a school of magic. The book itself is fairly thick and the main character is entranced with a Tolkien esq story leading to his acceptance. He takes a test at some random school school in the woods, and there's a point in the book where students are turned into geese and fly to a copy of the school in the arctic. The book was in hardback at Barnes and Noble in 2009 and I cannot seem to find it. Oh and I think the word mage appears in the title, and I know the book isn't the Unsuspecting Mage by Brian Pratt.