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The Thinking Woman’s Guide to Real Magic
Nora’s life is not quite going as planned. The man of her dreams is getting married, but not to her; her academic career has stalled; and there’s a mouse in her kitchen…. Getting away for the weekend for a friend’s wedding seems like perfect timing, especially when she stumbles across the unfeasibly glamorous Ilissa, who immediately takes Nora under her wing.
Through Ilissa, Nora is introduced to a whole new world – a world of unbelievable decadence and riches where time is meaningless and everyone is beautiful. And Nora herself feels different: more attractive; more talented; more popular…. Yet something doesn’t quite ring true: Was she really talking to Oscar Wilde at Ilissa’s party last night? Or transported from New York to Paris in the blink of an eye?
It is only after Ilissa’s son, Raclin, asks Nora to marry him that the truth about her new friends becomes apparent. By then, though, it’s too late, and Nora may never be able to return to the world, and the life, she knew before.
If she is to escape Raclin and Ilissa’s clutches, her only real hope—and an unlikely one at that—is the magician Aruendiel. A grim, reclusive figure with a biting tongue and a shrouded past, he might just teach her what she needs to survive and perhaps even make it home: the art of real magic.
For fans of Deborah Harkness’s All Souls Trilogy, Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, or Lev Grossman’s Magicians series, The Thinking Woman’s Guide to Real Magic by Emily Croy Barker is proof that magic not only exists but—like love—can sweep you off your feet when you least expect it….
More praise for The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic
"A clever and scrumptious debut fantasy, the kind you happily disappear into for days." —Kelly Link, author of Magic for Beginners
“Emily Croy Barker has written a sophisticated fairy tale that has one foot through the looking glass and the other squarely planted in the real world.... An imaginative synthesis of the stories that delighted us as children and the novels that inspired us as adults.” —Ivy Pochoda, author of The Art of Disappearing and Visitation Street
"A wonderfully imaginative world of illusion and real magic that reveals the importance of a curious and open mind, learning, and love." —Karen Engelmann, author of The Stockholm Octavo