To say this book is like Lev Grossman's The Magicians is like saying eating foie gras is like eating a rectum. Sure, they're both parts of the same animal's internal organs, but in one situation you're eating lovely, unctuous, rich goodness, and in the other you're just eating mostly digested crap. 
 Considering I really liked The Magicians, and that I absolutely loved Pride & Prejudice, you don't even want to hear me make a metaphor on this book's supposed similarity to the aforementioned book. My anger-fueled metaphor would involve something to the likes of a putrefying corpse, a regurgitated meal, and a honey badger. 
 The title: complete misnomer. For one thing, we're led to believe that our heroine is a thinking woman. Nora is not. She's a fucking moron. When we meet her, Nora is a woman with #firstworldproblems up the yin yang. She's an English Ph.D candidate whose dissertation is coming undone, or rather...un-Donne. She knowingly chose a topic that's been plowed over and over and over by thousands of other candidates, and is now shocked, utterly SHOCKED, I tell you, that she's stuck without a viable idea on which to write. Her brilliant, charismatic, distant (and long-distance) boyfriend also chooses this particular time to announce that he's getting married...but not to her. To his other girlfriend, who is more interesting and more intelligent (and to be honest, I completely sympathized with the boyfriend). Awkward. Nora also nurses some pretty harsh, antagonistic attitude towards her very competent mentor, who seems to have it all together. 
 "Nora braced herself, trying as always to find Naomi's presence empowering instead of terrifying...Last fall, in a single semester, she had produced both [a] baby and a book on sexual ambiguity in Dickens."So topping off this disastrous weekend, Nora wanders off, and that's where the idiocy and madness (not to mention boredom) begins. She didn't get sucked into some mysterious magical portal, she trespasses onto a property and literally drinks the fucking Kool-Aid. 
 "The pitcher, dewy with condensation, drew Nora's attention. Coming closer, she saw it was full of some drink that looked like cranberry juice or iced Red Zinger or even cherry Kool-Aid. Anything cool and liquid was fine with her. She poured herself a drink, ice cubes chiming in her glass, and took a long swallow. Some sort of punch. She couldn't quite describe the flavor. Draining her glass, she poured herself another."Now here is where the book deviates from my expectations. I thought this would be a magical book, a fantasy...it was, but it never captured my imagination, it was never a pleasure to read, it was never magical, it never gave me the sense of emotion of anything except "Dear god, when will this book be over?" 
 Nora got sucked into this situation due to her own stupidity, she gets enchanted by a mysterious woman and her band of oddly-named friends, and it is a literal whirlwind. Within the next...25 pages or so, Nora is given a magical makeover, gets pulled into the jet-setting lifestyle of the strange group of well...strangers, gets engaged, wanders through yet another portal from out of nowhere, meets a band of ruffians and a mysterious magicians, gets married, and gets pregnant. All within the fog-induced coma of enchantment. This part frustrated me so much because Nora was so passively accepting of all these whirlwind events without question, there are blanks in her memory, there are gaps in her personal narrative, all of which she accepts without any question whatsoever. All under the guise of enchantment, because that excuses the suspension of disbelief and idiocy. 
 All that happens within the first 10% of the book. You should probably stop reading here, because the next 500 pages or so is pure utter boredom. There is no comparison to The Magicians. None. The people within that book were well-built, not likeable, but they had personality, character. Nora had none. She spent the majority of the book passive, bewildered, and pulled along with no sense of direction. 
 There's a reason for this: Nora has been enchanted, but there is only so far that I can tolerate the guise of enchantment as an excuse for stupidity and denial, and I completely lost my patience with her. She is a hypocrite, she can't make up her fucking mind whether or not magic exists, despite living in an world chock-full of it. She throws tantrums, she throws objects in fury and rejection of the idea of magic and that she is stuck within this world, yet at the same time... 
 "Nora went over to the wall where the magician had disappeared and touched the freckled granite. It was solid and cool beneath her fingertips. 
 Into the silence that followed, Nora said quickly: "Open Sesame." Then, louder: "Open Sesame!" She waited."The characterization within this book is severely lacking. There is a whole lot of telling, and not a lot of showing. The characters only act, the insights into their minds are not introspective, the characters are not complex, and they do not develop enough for me to feel like they're anything but words on paper. I wanted to sympathize with Nora, I really do. As a woman in her 20s myself, I wanted to feel her insecurities, her uncertainties, her hurts...I wanted to relate to her as a woman...unfortunately, she only evoked within me the emotion of impatience, annoyance, and disapproval. 
 There are some sad attempts at incorporating elements of Pride & Prejudice into this book, including our main character's translation of that book into Ors (the magical world's native language). Nora rather unimaginatively compares her brooding magician Arundiel to Mr. Darcy, when he's actually a lot more like Blackbeard. For example, Arundiel is proud, he has highly stringent opinions of propriety, of station, of how a proper woman should act. *snort* I don't buy it. It's a half-hearted attempt at making a him a parallel of the dearly, dearly beloved Darcy, and Arundiel is not worthy to lick Darcy's horse-shit-covered riding boots. 
 Oh, and Arundiel's got a mysterious past, involving a murdered wife, and numerous liaisons with other women, but who cares, he's her teacher, and he's kind of cute, in a cranky, I-don't-care-about-you-at-all kind of way. LET'S JUST OVERLOOK THE WHOLE MURDERED WIFE THING, SHALL WE? 
 I can forgive a boring plot and boring characters, but the reason I gave this book such a low rating is that it was not worth my time reading it. 
 The writing is not excellent, but it is adequate; it does not run towards purple prose, and I can tolerate that. What I cannot forgive, and what is ultimately my reason for knocking this down to a 1 is the sheer length of it, I feel like I wasted hours of my life on nothing. This book could have 300 pages cut from it without me feeling like I missed out on anything. A lot of the book is completely extraneous, for example, the stupid visit to the royal court, the case of the cannibalized child, the constant dialogues that seem to go nowhere. The continuous addition to a large cast that serves absolutely no purpose. I understand that this is the author's attempt at immersing us into a magical world and its people---and it utterly fails. 
 There is a way of building a magical, fantastical world that engrosses me and this book fell far short of the mark. I was left bored, and embittered by the waste of the hours I spent reading a book that never entertained me. 
 Not recommended at all.