Blog Tour, Q&A, & Giveaway: The Thinking Woman’s Guide to Real Magic

Confession time: I’m not quite finished with The Thinking Woman’s Guide to Real Magic.  And you know what?  I’m OK with that, because I’m really enjoying it and I don’t want it to end.  (Especially since I know it ends on a cliffhanger of sorts.)   Instead of rushing through, I find I want to read more slowly.  Emily Croy Barker mentioned her love of denser fantasy, and it shows.  This isn’t an action-packed novel — though there is certainly plenty of action, and tension enough to keep you reading.  But there are also more leisurely sections, and much more of Nora’s interior life than you would find in a less character-driven, faster-paced book.

I think all of us who read fantasy have daydreamed about finding our way into another world, one where magic actually works.  Nora gets to live that dream (though it wasn’t really her dream to begin with) and she finds that it’s not all fairy godmothers and pumpkin juice.   It takes her a while to figure that out, of course, and her awakening is rather brutal. Then she has to come to terms with the new reality in which she finds herself. 

I love the title, The Thinking Woman’s Guide to Real Magic.  Nora is indeed a thinking woman, a woman to whom the life of the mind has been almost everything.  Yet during the initial part of the book, after she stumbles into the alternate world, there’s a period in which she is (as Emily says in the Q&A) easily lulled, seduced by the magic around and on her.  It was frustrating and yet very believable to watch this intelligent but insecure and hurting young woman sinking into a false happiness, a drugged and nearly mindless haze — and doing it willingly.  I was relieved when she finally came out of it enough to question what was going on, both for her sake and because she’s a much more interesting character when she’s using her mind!

Of course, Nora’s life in an essentially feudal society is far from easy to adjust to: a modern woman, accustomed to equality of both class and gender, suddenly immersed in a society in which men and aristocrats hold the power, and women are generally illiterate.  She has to teach herself to read Ors, and even to work her first bit of magic.  I admire and relate to her anger and her stubborn determination to succeed, to reclaim for herself something akin to the intellectual life she had as a graduate student.  At the same time, I’m fascinated by the differences between Aruendiel’s world and ours, in how those are reflected in the language and customs and even personal names.

I’m also having fun trying to spot all the literary allusions and parallels.  There’s the obvious resonance with Pride and Prejudice that Emily talked about above, particularly as Nora and the prickly magician Aruendiel are getting to know one another.  But there are others, both before and after she enters that other world — John Donne, Emily Dickinson, Cinderella, Irish and British folk myths, Grimm’s fairy tales, even Shakespeare.  Many of them are almost throwaway moments — a brief quotation, a reference to a woman with snakes for hair — but it’s always satisfying to spot one.

There’s humor in The Thinking Woman’s Guide to Real Magic, too.  Sometime’s it’s subtle; occasionally it makes me chuckle aloud, as in this passage, in which Aruendiel and another magician are discussing how to find a missing colleague:

     “We’ll start by visiting following Ilissa’s trail, visiting the places that she has visited.”
     “How do you propose to do that?” [Aruendiel] asked, shaking his head. “By asking the walls what they saw?  By wood and water, that will take forever.  Once walls start talking, they never shut up.”

As much as he annoyed me initially, Aruendiel is growing on me.  He’s brilliant — and he knows it.  He can be disdainful, dismissive, and arrogant, then display a sudden flash of humor or act with unexpected compassion.  He’s not, at first or second or even third or fourth glance, a likely romantic hero, and if (as the Pride and Prejudice parallels suggest) he and Nora are headed toward a relationship, it’s likely to be a rocky road before they get there.  But he’s never boring, and his attitude provides Nora with just the prod she needs at times.

The publicity for The Thinking Woman’s Guide to Real Magic suggests the book will appeal to fans of Deborah Harkness, and Emily herself thinks it will appeal to adult fans of Harry Potter.  Both of those are true (certainly in my case!), but I’ll also add that if you enjoyed Bee Ridgeway’s The River of No Return, you’ll probably like The Thinking Woman’s Guide to Real Magic.  TTWGtRG is more classic fantasy, with its Faitoren (fae), medieval-analog society, and magic, but both books have that somewhat slower, more deliberate pace of a literary novel.  Emily Croy Barker has written a winner, one I plan to keep on my shelves for a long while.

About the author: A graduate of Harvard University, Emily Croy Barker has been a magazine journalist for more than 20 years. She is currently executive editor at The American Lawyer magazine. This is her first novel.   (biography source: author’s website)

Category: Fantasy; romance

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