Book Review: The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic

Book: The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic by Emily Croy Barker

Source: Library

Rating: 1 star (Did Not Finish)

Review:

Ugh, this was so awful and I thought the writing was really bad. The description said this was an imaginative story yeah right, this was far from being imaginative and the title is truly misleading because the main character Nora Fischer doesn't think at all. She comes across as being a real idiot most of the time. Where was the intelligence? Not in this book that's for sure.

I guess when I saw the title I immediately imagined a Hermione Granger type character who sort of stumbled into the world of magic. I thought this was going to be a interesting mix of intelligence and magic. Boy was I wrong. Nora was a complete idiot and this book made no sense.

The writing was a big problem with this book, as soon as I started reading this it felt like I was in the middle of the story instead of the beginning. It was written as if the reader should already know what's going on. The characters have zero personality and the story has zero plot.

This was just a bloated windbag of a book. And for a book that has nearly 600 pages, there were so many scenes where nothing was happening. You would think a book of this size would have a lot of excitement to keep the reader engaged. I got to the point where I just could not read any more of this boring time waster.

I really can't stand Nora, besides being an idiot and having no personality there is nothing that makes her interesting. She's a graduate student but doesn't seem to know what to do with her dissertation (which is understandable) but most of the time she was so stupid, passive, boring, flighty, a doormat as well as not questioning any of the so-called magical things that was happening to her in this book. She just went along with it. And to top it all off she was a damsel-in-distress, she really couldn't do or figure out anything.

Another problem I had with this book was it felt like it was a bad retelling of several books instead of being something original and unique. There was too much going on and with the bad writing I had no trouble deciding to stop reading this.

Overall, this book had no plot and feels like the equivalent of flipping channels on TV and trying to mold all the different clips into one show.