The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic / Emily Croy Barker / 563 pages

A debut novelist, Barker does a commendable job of creating a parallel world in which magic plays in important role in everyday life.  Her main character Nora is the "thinking woman," a graduate student stalled in her dissertation on English literature who accidentally stumbles through the portal into another world and discovers her potential as a magician.  This is really a long book that I mostly enjoyed.  It seems is though there might be sequels to continue Nora's story.