The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic

I only managed to read the last 300 pages because I made myself finish in order to properly evaluate the book as a whole, which is not a good sign.

The most common complaint about Thinking Woman's Guide is that it's too long, and it is - not because nobody has the attention span for almost 600 pages, but because an almost 600 page book should have a reason for being almost 600 pages. There should be intense twists and turns in the plot, or a colossal backstory or universe that you want to drink in for days and days. In contrast to Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, for example, TWG just feels ... padded. There are a lot of details about the world thrown in, but they don't have an underlying coherency to imply that Barker spent much time fleshing out the details of the different countries, the aristocracy, the politics, etc. as a scaffolding to hang the story on, and so they aren't that memorable.

The beginning of the book is promising. Drippy Nora is a failing, kind of directionless English lit grad student or PhD candidate; after being dumped by her boyfriend, she's out for a walk in the woods when she comes across a spooky old graveyard, steps through a portal between worlds, and ends up in the thrall of a group of fairies. ("Faitoren", but basically the fairies/faeries/fae of traditional folklore.) So far, not too bad. It's clear to probably most readers from early on that this is all glamour and enchantment, but it's reasonable for Nora not to get that since she's being affected by their magic from the word go. This section of the book I really enjoyed - it was just fun to read about all the crazy glamourous parties Ilissa (fairy queen) was throwing! When it all went wrong it was suitably horrifying and scary.

Nora is rescued by Aruendiel, an irascible old (very old) magician, and goes to live in his home. This is where the book grinds to a halt. He's the one who offered to save her in the first place, when she was still under enchantments and didn't realize she needed saving, but once she's out he has no plans for what to do with her. She can't go back home for handwavey magic reasons (acceptable), she can't leave his estate because the world is dangerous for a young woman traveling alone (acceptable to me but not Nora; more on that later). She just kind of starts working with his housekeeper, and at one point goes to the capital city with him for reasons I don't remember. It's a lot of nothing! Not only is there very little plot happening during the large middle part of the book, there's not much emotion, either. There's a smidgeon of a hint at a potential romance in that Aruendiel is annoyed by Nora's being unconventional for the world (dude, of course she doesn't know your standards, you know she's from Earth) and Nora is annoyed by Aruendiel's being annoyed with her (dude, get over it), but apart from occasional flickers of attraction on his part there's simply no emotion to it until fairly close to the end of the book. I can ship just about any two characters if you imply they might like each other, and I was actually shipping them back when he rescued her, but the rest of the book killed it. Killed it dead. At the end of the book I hoped she would end up with the cute guy, but he was barely in it so it did not happen.

Eventually, he starts to teach her magic - which also felt well-padded. It's hard to do learning magic in fiction well - the writer's obviously never done it, and the reader hasn't either, so there's nothing to draw from; plus it can't bee too easy or the reader says, "why isn't everyone doing magic to get everything all the time?" So Barker leans in the other direction and learning magic is incremental and tedious. (If there's enough of a plot, you can always handwave how the magic works like Diana Wynne Jones or JK Rowling, but there's not enough plot here. The magic is the plot.) It's also hard enough that by the end of the book - I wouldn't say "the climax" as it didn't feel that much more high stakes; it was just sort of another event, Nora rescues Aruendiel in a way that made no sense and then there's a battle - when Nora is doing magic fairly naturally, it's difficult to take.

So in general, the book (like this review?) has a length problem. It also has a Pride & Prejudice problem. Nora brings a copy of P&P with her into this other world, and then we're meant to believe that she and Aruendiel have a relationship that parallels Elizabeth and Darcy's. They do not. Nora isn't witty and confident; Aruendiel is constantly getting angry with her for things that aren't her fault. Nora doesn't grow to realize that her early impression of Aruendiel colored her interpretations of later events or make her too quick to believe the worst. Aruendiel doesn't reassess his own actions and become visible as the person with good intentions that he truly is - frankly, he's cruel. In one instance, he's awful to Nora because she helpfully pointed out a mathematical error in the marketplace; later on, he refuses to give her money to replace her boots in the middle of winter, and as the cobbler is overcharging her she has to barter around town to get enough money, which results in gossip reaching him about it, so he demands she throw the new boots on the fire and keep wearing the leaky old ones. (She doesn't one of the few times I was really sympathetic to her.) No, the basic progression is that Nora is "fiesty" and Aruendiel eventually reveals that he found her attractive the whole time. It's much, much more like Jane Eyre than anything else - for reasons I haven't really gotten into, but there are quite a few parallels - so Barker's choice to use P&P feels like a cynical attempt to get readers because it's a truth universally acknowledged that young women's knowledge of classic lit ends at P&P.

I said I was going to talk about Nora's issues with sexism in this other world, but there wasn't an organic place to do it. So early on we have Nora fuming because Aruendiel said a young woman traveling alone isn't safe, even though he probably knows a bit more about this world than she does. At another point, she realizes that the grammar of Ors, the local language, uses speech markers based on the gender of the speaker, essentially particles added into women's speech, and complains that this is done to make women seem weak and hesitant. At the end, she blows up because Perin, the cute guy I mentioned before, asks Aruendiel's permission to marry her - not because he's asking way too soon, but because he asked the older person who appears to be her guardian/protector. Look, I get that a 21st century woman catapulted back to a medieval setting would probably care about and bring up women's issues, but these all seem bizarrely misaimed and made me roll my eyes. It's one thing to construct a misogynist world in order to tear it down (Mercedes Lackey and Anne McCaffrey did pretty well with that) - it's another to off-handedly throw out a bit of sexism that's unrelated to the rest of the plot entirely for the heroine to get mad at, or to write the heroine getting angry at attitudes that are really not that big of a deal. It also didn't help that apart from Hirazjikinis, Nora's not that close to or even terribly sympathetic to other women.

On the whole, the biggest thing that kept me from being able to get hooked was the lack of emotion. There were quite a few episodes that could have been fairly moving, but the characters devoted a moment's thought to them and moved on. They don't long for each other. They don't get especially frightened when the other one's in danger. They don't get humiliated or especially proud, either. They just don't feel that much about anything - and if they don't, why should I?

Some minor notes:

- The names in this book are crazy. When you repeatedly write "Hirazjakinis" or "Pusenieuv" you strain everyone's patience. This is a little hypocritical of me because I adored The Goblin Emperor which is easily twice as bad about this, but a) TGE is an amazing, amazing book so I can overlook it, and b) there are a lot fewer characters to keep track of in it.

- Do not take potshots at Harry Potter. Do not have your main character admit to not having read it but also being sure the magic in it isn't "real" like what she's been practicing.

The short version:
I kind of want to loathe this book, but it's so dull that I just can't muster up the amount of passion for it that loathing requires.

The long version:
1. I probably shouldn't have given this a star rating as I only read 200 pages (of a book well over 500 pages) although I did skim the last 10 pages or so. I thought about continuing on (I didn't actively hate it) but eventually decided that it was taking away the time and opportunity I have to read books that are actually good. So I stopped.

2. But it was so tedious I just couldn't justify continuing to read any further, and 200 pages should be enough to have an idea of the book as a whole. If it's not, then it's a shitty book that could do with some serious editing for cohesion.

3. It had a promising start-- a grad student finds herself lost in another world and, under a mountain of enchantments cast by a big bad fairy queen, ends up in quite a bit of personal trouble until she is saved by a wizard, at which point (we are led to believe) she will need to learn magic and figure out a way home. That gets us to roughly page 100. So far, not great literature by any means but enjoyable enough.

4. The next hundred pages are devoted to travel from the wizard's castle to the king's palace for a meeting, the meeting, and half-assed snippets of historical and political context that are supposed to explain the background of the wizard-fairy queen dealings in which the hapless grad student now finds herself a pawn. I think I've done a huge disservice by making this sound more interesting than it is. Make no mistake: this is phenomenally uninteresting. Not to mention, the obvious--and potentially interesting-- plot points (get home, learn magic) are almost completely abandoned. Having read the last 10 pages I know that they are eventually addressed again, but this book isn't good enough to keep reading, waiting waiting waiting for it to get mildly interesting again.

5. Characters don't need to be likeable but they do need to be interesting. The grad student (presumably the titular "thinking woman") is beyond insipid; I constantly had the impression that opinions and actions were assigned to her in order to make her complex, but without effect. Calling cardboard "fibrous", while the description may be accurate, doesn't suddenly turn it into breakfast cereal. There's nothing driving her, and nothing driving the other characters either. She's certainly not "thinking"-- if she were, she might have thought harder about her dissertation topic (you can't really claim to be scooped if your topic is already the source of much published work BEFORE TOU EVEN START YOUR PROJECT, and then go ahead and start your project anyway) and she certainly shouldn't be surprised when her advisor asks about the work she hasn't been doing for the past year. Having read some of the other community reviews, she apparently makes some very questionable judgements of character later on, for which enchantment cannot be used as an excuse, and which strongly indicate she is still not "thinking"; this aligns perfectly with the section of the book I read in which she floats passively along doing absolutely nothing of any consequence of her own accord. Mostly I found this book completely dull but I have managed to scrounge up a bit of negative emotion: I find it fairly insulting that we are supposed to approve of this empty-headed moron of a character as some sort of clever feminist hero.

6. Oh my god it's just so fucking blah.

I am always skeptical about books that send modern day women into MagicLand.

(I am maybe the only soul on Earth not smitten with the Outlander series. The TV show is fascinating, but the books? No. And don't even get me started on "A Discovery of Witches." I found it overblown and the characters rather wooden. It was generally tedious and tiresome to the point that I groaned in despair that it would not mercifully end, but leave us dangling for the sequel. Which I have heard are not any better. Pass.)

So Witchy romance novels are sketchy for me at best. But I decided to check this out from the library, and I am glad I did. It is almost never clichéd, with interesting twists and turns of the plot that are not telegraphed miles away, the relationships are less obvious than other romantic fare, and I genuinely liked all the characters.

It's a fun story, well-told, and not predictable. It has plenty of detail to take you into a very believable Otherworld, yet, unlike "Discovery," they don't take over the narrative.

Even though it was well over 550 pages, I was surprised to find myself in that rare and delectable place of not wanting it to end.

Thankfully, THIS sequel is one I can hardly wait for!