This is not a real book review

A few months ago, a magazine editor sent me a novel, 
The Thinking Woman’s Guide to Real Magic by Emily Croy Barker, to
review for her magazine. The blurb on the back of the book tells us that
a graduate student named Nora goes to a friend’s wedding, wanders off,
and “somehow finds herself in another realm.” She meets the “glamorous
and endlessly charming Ilissa, who introduces Nora to a decadent new world—and
to her gorgeous son. … It’s almost too good to be true.” But then Nora
wanders away from a party and comes into another realm in which she meets
men who tell her that Ilissa’s realm is evil and Ilissa just kidnapped
her to breed an heir. Sure enough, she gets pregnant. The handsome prince,
having done his duty, takes up with other glamorous (but evil) women. But
Nora’s baby dies and—

I got as far as page 48. At which point I wrote to the magazine editor
and told her the book is not only poorly written but its plot is awful.
It’s a clichéd, Disneyfied, dark fairy tale/romance novel. “Ditch it,”
the magazine editor wrote back.




But, hey—I’m a novelist, too, and I like fairy tales a lot, and I have
a good imagination. So here goes.




Alternate plot #1. Nora wakes up from this bad dream about the Land of
Faerie and learns that she’s been living her mundane life for forty years
and is still a graduate student. She’s still working on what appears to
be her doctoral dissertation, the writing of which has soared high in the
realm of obscure, esoteric, post-modernist litcrit discourse about hegemonies
and normative spaces. Her first dissertation director shot himself, her
second one retired, her third one got a job somewhere else, her fourth
one told her to choose a more relevant topic, her fifth one…well, you get
the idea. Her old boy friends all have jobs at prestigious universities
now, but she’s been working as a part-time waitress for those forty years
while she’s still trying to finish her dissertation. (Elements of this
plot come from observed real life. But not mine.)




Alternate plot #2. Having nothing better to do, Nora picks up her crossbow
and competes in a contest in Ilissa’s realm in which strangers are hunted
down, then killed, barbequed, and eaten. As the handsome prince’s divorced
wife, Nora is no longer a stranger, so she doesn’t have to start running
(or hide the barbeque sauce). But she’s basically a kind-hearted person
and is loath to join the hunting faction. This earns her the enmity of
the other glamorous but evil hunters, however, so she starts getting ambushed
or otherwise embarrassed and soon finds herself on the run anyway. She
meets dwarves and singing squirrels and talking trees (some of which throw
their apples at passers-by) and learns to live quite comfortably in tree
houses in the crowns of the latter. She also learns to leap from limb to
limb. Then she meets a really smart monkey. It’s love at first sight.




Alternate plot #3. Nora discovers she has super powers. And a hair-trigger
temper. She’s hugely pregnant, but when she utters the magic word—how about
“shazaam”—she turns into a lithe beauty wearing red hot pants and a cloth-of-gold
bustier. Among her super powers is the ability to create any kind of weapon
she can imagine using her magical 3D printer, which hangs from her belt
in a capsule and expands to life size when she flips the switch. The handsome
prince, who never learned anything in his life but how to be charming,
is still tomcatting around the palace, and, as in both her roles as abandoned
pregnant princess and superhera, Nora is getting really pissed. So she
goes off into the woods, stops near a tower with a singing maiden up on
the top floor, and sets up the magical 3D printer. Listening to the maiden’s
sad song, she decides on two print jobs. The first one is to make a lead
chastity belt for Ilissa’s son. “If I can’t have him to myself,” she mutters,
“nobody else can either.” The second print job is a ladder to get the singing
maiden down out of that tower. The maiden comes down. Nora directs her
to an alternative Julliard for proper voice lessons.




Alternate plot #4. Still pregnant, Nora remembers that she was a graduate
student in English literature in the other real world. The most recent
classes she can remember were Restoration drama, 18th-century novels, and
Victorian novels. She decides she’ll sit out the rest of her pregnancy
by writing a long epistolary novel describing Ilissa’s realm and all the
curious fauna and flora in it. She’ll cleverly give all the animals and
plants appropriate voices and philosophies. She’s also thinking she’ll
introduce the other realm by having her heroine, whose name is Caroline
Augusta Wortley Montague, fall down a rabbit hole and step out into the
court of Charles II of England. Which is being invaded by Ilissa’s army
of tin soldiers that can transform themselves into huge winged tanks and
humvees and MRAP vehicles. Charles’ army is really tired because it’s still
fighting against Puritans left over from the Interregnum, so they lose
the war…at which point Nora suddenly realizes that she’s lost her plot
somewhere. And she’ll never find it again. She decides to just have the
baby.




Alternate plot #5. Still pregnant, Nora realizes that (a) she needs to
get out of the palace once in a while and (b) she really needs to exercise.
So she heads out to the nearby gym/day spa/dance studio and signs up for
classes. The director of the dance studio is Busby Berkeley. Nora soon
learns that all you have to do in his dance classes is pose. Berkeley uses
his magical camera to turn a dozen flabby women into an army of chorus
girls who “dance” in kaleidoscopic patterns as the camera moves through
the forest of flailing female legs. At the same time, the magical camera
sucks all the cellulite out of those legs (and tummies, too). Nora gives
it a try, but Berkeley is more dictatorial than Ilissa herself, so she
quits and tries the day spa. It’s run by a corporation of retired cosmetic
surgeons who, along with their customers, put on elaborate carnival masks
and perform delicious sexual exercises. Pretty soon, though, Nora and the
Real Housewives of Ilissa County get mad at being taken advantage of (no
matter how delicious it is), so they call in an army of crocodiles and
the surgeons all run away. Now Nora turns to the gym, which is run by a
beautiful witch with impossibly glossy hair and cheekbones. The witch confides
that she has recently shed a hundred pounds, thanks to packaged nutritious
food (with snacks!) delivered to her door (at a huge price) every month,
plus daily yoga. Nora signs up, learns a bunch of yoga poses and—




—enough of this. I bet you can see where it’s going. I’m pretty confident
that none of these plots could ever grow into a novel. If you’re a movie
producer, though, I’m available for a conversation.