(no subject)

[chocolatepot]

I started reading The Thinking Woman's Guide to Magic because it has a very attractive cover, and when I flipped through the beginning I could tell it was starting out fairly quickly with the main character enchanted by fairies, with the whole "they're creepy and fake but hide it under glamour" trope, which was kind of a brave choice - having her spend ~100 pages obviously brainwashed early in the book, you know? It starts starts with her as a grad student writing about Donne, which is incredibly annoying to me at this point (female characters who are English lit grad students are one cliché that "doing it fully and earnestly" doesn't make it more fun for me; just no) but that slipped by fast. Overall I was having a pretty good time with it, but then the obvious Romantic Interest revealed himself and I just dunnooooo. He's older, gruff, knowledgeable, etc. while she's younger and naive and a newcomer to the fantasy world, which isn't terrible. But from reviews and the text I can tell it's supposed to be something of a P&P parallel, and it really annoys me when people's P&P parallels show that they don't really get P&P (especially if they went to Harvard like the author, most likely for English lit given the heroine). They don't go off P&P, they go off Beauty and the Beast, or something like it. It's never nuanced enough and giving us the Darcy's PoV ruins it, imo. This guy's just kind of a megajerk and the way he treats the heroine is less due to position and perception and more to do with him just being a megajerk.