Review: Emily Croy Barker, The Thinking Woman’s Guide to Real Magic

Alternate Worlds. What Could Go Wrong?

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.

My Thoughts

When this book first started, I really liked Nora’s character. She was pathetically boring. She wasn’t quirky, or had a strong personality. She was as normal as anyone could possibly be. I was very excited to see how she would go on an adventure, and learn more about herself and get over her ex.

This is where the spoilers start!

There were a lot of things that bothered me about this story, but they didn’t become prominent to me until I got closer to the end. One part I did love, however, was the antagonists. I really enjoyed Ilissa’s character. I’m a huge fan of a manipulative villain, not one who’s just a bad guy, but one that can convince the protagonist that they could be wrong about the villain’s motives, that they should sympathize with the villain, and they should care about them. Ilissa does this so well with her charms and the manner in which she speaks to Nora. Nora knows she should hate Ilissa for what she did to her, but part of her mind is in conflict with the other, because she remembers how much Ilissa spoiled her and made her feel important for the first time in her life. It was an incredibly cruel and clever thing to do, especially since Nora’s feelings were already fragile from her breakup. I also liked how intensely terrifying Raclin was once readers got to see his true form. It was really refreshing reading about a threat that was actually a challenge to take down.

Another great thing about this book is the way Barker wrote descriptions. I loved that Barker went to the lengths of creating new languages for Nora to learn and understand. I really liked that she wanted to learn how to read and write it properly, which seemed very much like something an English major (like me) would do.

I liked Aruendiel’s character as well. He wasn’t your typical “helper” character, where everything he did benefitted Nora. Sure, he was serious about protecting her, but not because he cared about her that much. His hatred for Ilissa was motivation enough to prevent her from capturing Nora again, and the fact that Nora was interested in magic and helpful around the house made her tolerable. I really enjoyed his character until the last fifty pages of the book.

If you’ve read this book and seen Monty Python, you know exactly what I’m talking about. The film’s budget ran out, and the film came to an abrupt stop. It made the film even funnier, especially since it was meant to be a parody of Arthur’s Knights. However, Thinking Woman’s Guide tried to do the same thing and failed. It was as if Barker exhausted all of her ideas for the book, or ran out of time, and tried to come up with some kind of ending that still left some options open. I did read somewhere that this was originally intended to be the beginning of a series, but that doesn’t excuse some of the events (or lack thereof) at the end. All of the sudden, everyone has forgotten about Ilissa and Raclin. It’s like they gave up on trying to find them since they couldn’t find them in the Faitoren world, and just decided that the war was over after one day. The end battle was so rushed, and it seemed unnecessary to kill off Hirizjahkinis–aka the token black character.

Hirizjahkinis’ character bothered me the most. Barker did a great job describing this character that came from a warm climate and wore linens and dreadlocks and leopard capes. However, this sounded like a typical description of an African Queen from a 1970s movie. Unfortunately, nothing about Hirizjahkinis was unique, and that made Mrs. Toristel’s racist remarks even more unnecessary. It makes sense for certain characters to face racism in this magical world, but Barker could have picked literally any other color for Hirizjahkinis’ skin. You’d think a magical world would have humans that were more colors than black and brown, especially after reading about the illusion of a green-skinned person in the Faitoren realm.

Barker’s lack of creativity is also clear in her world building skills. Despite giving us beautiful descriptions of castles, countryside, and villages, they all seemed too familiar. Everything Barker described sounds like the same type of landscape you’d hear about in a guided tour of the Irish Coast. Everything sounded like it was straight from the medieval period of Europe, right down to the patriarchal views of the society. Even the status symbols of the knights and the lords and landowners sounded straight out of my high school world history textbook. Barker could have created any kind of social system, but she chose to make everything exactly like every other fantasy story. I wasn’t expecting everything to be completely different, but I was hoping to read something that wasn’t a carbon copy of The Princess Bride.

By the time I got to the last fifty pages, I was excited to see how the battle with Ilissa would play out. Again, I was disappointed, because they disappear, and then all of the sudden, the Faitoren are making peace treaties with the humans, and Nora is hanging out with an ice demon, and that one unnecessary character from 300 pages ago is back again to actually be useful this time. The ending of this book felt so rushed. How do the Faitoren just suddenly know how to govern, even though most of their exposure to politics is just social formalities for interacting with humans? Maybe it’s supposed to be implied that the humans help them set up a new government, but that would be way too close to British colonization, and Barker can’t possibly be that unoriginal.

After reading 400 pages of a book that was so specific down to the details of what is served for dinner, the ending was pathetic. I do like that Nora went home, because it opens up the possibility that she could visit the magical world again. However, I didn’t like that she’s suddenly spending time with this family that she doesn’t even mention until halfway into the book. I wish Barker had given Nora’s siblings more personality than generic siblings from a 2005 Disney Channel Original Movie. We don’t hear anything about Nora’s roommate reaching out, or her trying to contact her advisor, which would seem like a priority to someone who was so concerned about her education and her future before, and only gave up on it because she wasn’t sure if she’d ever return to her world. It’s as if her time in the magical world changes so much that she can’t return to her own life at all. There isn’t even a hint that Nora thinks about her education, or any of her friends again.

On top of all of that character shift, Nora is suddenly lovestruck at the end of the book, which seems extremely out of character for someone who has spent 550 pages criticizing the patriarchal views of marriage and love in a magical world, and doing everything in her power to appear as a strong, independent woman in a society where it is unheard of. I wish her primary motivation for wanting to return to the magical world was to help protect against Ilissa and Raclin coming back, or to learn more magic from Aruendiel. I definitely would have loved if she was going back to hunt down Raclin, just to get the ring off. It didn’t seem like Nora to want to go back to just see Aruendiel because she suddenly thought she loved him in a romantic way. I’d be surprised if Nora really wasn’t over Adam, and only saw Aruendiel as a rebound.

Should You Read It?

I really wanted to like this one, especially since it was about an English major, and I’d heard that the writing was amazing. However, by the end of this book, I was questioning wether or not it was supposed to be a satirical approach to fantasy, and not a serious one. If you enjoy fantasy stories, you may enjoy this one, too. Feel free to read it for yourself, but I don’t see myself rereading it.

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