Karen L. Mead

It’s probably just random luck, but I keep running into books where the main character happens to be a disillusioned academic who’s struggling with his or her dissertation. I find it amusing to think that this is the new normal for fiction. Maybe if I go back to school for my PhD, I too can be a fantasy protagonist? It’s tempting.

Unlike my last read, The Weight of Ink, which was historical fiction, The Thinking Woman’s Guide to Real Magic by Emily Croy Barker is fantasy, and therefore more solidly in my wheelhouse. It’s got an unusual structure: early in the book, main gal Nora becomes captive of the fairies and her life is that of a fairytale princess. She enjoys constant balls and amusements, and even a prince for a husband. Of course, fairies and their magic are always pure manipulative nonsense, so once she’s taken out of her little pixie-cocoon, life in her new medieval-esque world is much harsher. She has to struggle to survive as a scullery maid in the spartan home of a wizard who took pity on her, and dreams of wielding her own magic someday so she can survive without his support.

Initially I thought this was going to be kind of like The Count of Monte Cristo with magic– that Nora was going to train up her magic to get back at the fairies, and the whole second half of the book would be her giving her cruel captors their just deserts. I was very wrong, but if that kind of book does exist let me know, because it sounds like a lot of fun.

Perhaps Nora is just a nicer person than me, but getting revenge on the fairies turns out to be pretty low on her list of priorities. What matters is learning the craft of magic from the wizard, Arundiel, a very old man with as many secrets as the day is long. Initially I didn’t think there was going to be a romance because of the age difference between the two leads, but I was wrong again; apparently Arundiel is kept young by his magic, and though he’s still battle-scarred and bitter, he’s not completely ineligible for romance. There’s a clever parallel between Nora’s story and Pride and Prejudice, the one book from her original world that happens to be in her possession. She can see that Arundiel is like Darcy, but doesn’t realize until much later how much she’s acting like Elizabeth Bennet.

The weakness of this book is that Nora’s job as an assistant housekeeper keeps the narrative full of mundane tasks. The poor woman is constantly sweeping and peeling potatoes and such, and while she does learn some magic, the ratio of “magic time” to “sweep the floor time” is rather low, especially at the beginning. There aren’t all that many characters for a book this size, so Nora is just about always interacting with either Arundiel or the housekeeper, which gets stale after a while. I do think Barker’s world is richly imagined, but she’s only giving it to us a little bit at a time.

Barker’s conception of magic is interesting: she separates “wizards” from “magicians,” with wizards being very much the lesser mages. Take that, Harry Potter. Nora is training to be a magician, not a wizard, so she’s got her work cut out for her. It’s fun to watch her learn new spells, but I wonder if more could have been done with this. It’s the kind of magic with “to fix the broken bowl, feel the pieces of the bowl and how they want to fit together,” so you can probably extrapolate from that how most spells are going to work.

I was actually really disappointed by the ending, not realizing there was a sequel. Now that I know the sequel’s out, I can just call the ending mildly disappointing and not maddeningly so. Unfortunately, my library does not have the sequel– I just looked today. Darn it, library, why do you hurt me?

I wasn’t absolutely blown away by this book, but I did enjoy it and will hunt down the sequel in some form– maybe in the sense that I will trade little green papers from my wallet for it. Stranger things have happened.