The Thinking Woman's Guide To Real Magic / Emily Croy Barker
1,001 Days of Awesome Reads - Day 204
I heard about THE THINKING WOMAN’S GUIDE TO REAL MAGIC from a an author’s FB page (though I don’t remember who), and since I’m on a magic kick, I thought I’d pick it up. I checked it out from my library via Libby in audio.
I really enjoyed this book in some ways, but there were some things that kept me from loving it. It was a sprawling story, and there were parts of it that dragged. Also, it has something of a cliffhanger ending, and I don’t like those much, especially when it’s unexpected.
Having said that, this was definitely a unique story and there were some really interesting aspects to it that I’ve never seen before.
Main character Nora falls into a magical world that at first feels like a haven from her unfulfilling real life, where her graduate studies are stalling and her boyfriend has just abandoned her. But when she realizes she’s being controlled by magic by the people she thinks care about her, she has to figure out how to extricate herself from their influence. And once she’s done that, she has to learn to survive in a world that is completely foreign to her, while trying to get home to her own world.
Fascinating and engaging, I recommend this book, with some reservations.
Happy reading! xoxo
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Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic | Emily Croy Barker
You can see all the books I’ve written about so far in my 1,001 Days of Awesome Reads project, which launched 2/14/22:
booksandfriends.substack.com/archive
THE THINKING WOMAN’S GUIDE TO REAL MAGIC
An imaginative story of a woman caught in an alternate world—where she will need to learn the skills of magic to survive.
Nora Fischer’s dissertation is stalled and her boyfriend is about to marry another woman. During a miserable weekend at a friend’s wedding, Nora wanders off and walks through a portal into a different world where she’s transformed from a drab grad student into a stunning beauty. Before long, she has a set of glamorous new friends and her romance with gorgeous, masterful Raclin is heating up. It’s almost too good to be true.
Then the elegant veneer shatters. Nora’s new fantasy world turns darker, a fairy tale gone incredibly wrong. Making it here will take skills Nora never learned in graduate school. Her only real ally—and a reluctant one at that—is the magician Aruendiel, a grim, reclusive figure with a biting tongue and a shrouded past. And it will take her becoming Aruendiel’s student—and learning magic herself—to survive. When a passage home finally opens, Nora must weigh her “real life” against the dangerous power of love and magic.
For lovers of Lev Grossman's The Magicians series (The Magicians and The Magician King) and Deborah Harkness's All Souls Trilogy (A Discovery of Witches and Shadow of Night).
About Bobbi Dumas
Hi! I’m Bobbi and I read, review, blog about and advocate for fiction written by women. I’ve written for NPR, Barnes & Noble and The New York Times Book Review, and wrote over 600 reviews for Kirkus and also penned the weekly Kirkus Romance (and Women’s Fiction) blog for a few years before parting ways with them in 2020. I believe that romance novels are (mostly) by women, for women, about women and of interest to women, and offer more hope, female agency and positive change than any other literary genre.
Women write great books, yet typically get less respect (and less review ink) than men do. While I do occasionally read books by men, I try to spotlight books by women and hold them up for the attention and appreciation they deserve.
I hope you’ll follow this space and find great new books to dive into.
Let’s read! xoxo
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