The Thinking Woman’s Guide to Real Magic is a contemporary fantasy novel about Nora Fischer, a graduate student whose stalled academic life and personal disappointment lead her, almost accidentally, into a dangerous alternate world of illusion, enchantment, and real magic. At first, the world offered by the glamorous Ilissa seems like an escape from failure and heartbreak, but its beauty gradually reveals a darker logic of control, dependence, and deception. Nora’s uneasy alliance with the severe magician Aruendiel becomes the center of her struggle to understand magic, recover her own judgment, and decide what kind of life she is willing to fight for. The novel blends portal fantasy, literary references, romance, and questions of power and selfhood, leaving Nora caught between the ordinary world she has lost and the strange one that may change her permanently.
Author: Emily Croy Barker
Publisher: Penguin Books
Publication year: 2014
Number of pages: 576