Just Jennifer

The Thinking Woman’s Guide to Real Magic by Emily Croy Barker (Pamela Dorman Books, August 1, 2013)

Nora Fischer is an ABD (all-but-dissertation) grad student whose advisor has lost faith in her and whose ex-boyfriend has just invited her to his upcoming wedding to another woman.  At a weekend getaway, Nora takes a walk through the forest behind the guest cabin she and her friends are staying in and stumbles upon a glamorous woman, Ilissa, living in an incredible dream world and finds herself drawn deeper and deeper into Ilissa’s mysterious and sometimes magical world.  Feeling more confident, attractive and talented than ever, Nora is shocked when Ilissa’s son Raclin proposes marriage hurtling Nora into an evil world that is not at all the world into which she was initially drawn; Nora puts all her hope into a reclusive magician called Aruendiel with whom Nora must join forces and dig deep into her arsenal of knowledge and learning to escape the clutches of the evil pair and return to the world which is not seeming so dire and dreary to her all of a sudden.   Part fairy tale, part fable part morality tale, The Thinking Woman’s Guide to Real Magic is almost allegorical as Nora thinks her present life is in the dumps and going nowhere until she spends ten months in an unfamiliar and often evil place missing those people who were driving her crazy and gaining new perspective on how her life can lived with a new self-confidence if she is able to return to it.