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Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries: the Sunday Times Bestseller

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Brigid is a Queer fantasy and romance reader who believes fantasy and romance make the perfect book cocktail. She’s a character that’s interesting and unique, and not typical of what is usually written for a female character. This has led her to visiting the small village of Hrafnsvik and, subsequently, Wendell ends up following her in a similar vein as to a lost puppy. Emily Wilde’s Encyclopedia of Faeries is the perfect title for this book because it reads exactly like the title suggests.

Cambridge professor Emily Wilde is good at many things: She is the foremost expert on the study of faeries. There’s plenty of fae shenanigans and in fact the story takes a very dramatic turn which I certainly didn’t foresee. But as Emily gets closer and closer to uncovering the secrets of the Hidden Ones – the most elusive of all faeries – lurking in the shadowy forest outside the town, she also finds herself on the trail of another mystery: Who is Wendell Bambleby, and what does he really want?The story follows Professor Emily Wilde, a dryadologist, on fieldwork out in Ljosland (which appears to be a fake Scandi island, using the name of a real town in Norway) to uncover details of a particular type of faery for her great work – the first real encyclopaedia of all faeries.

I’ll also take a moment to say I suspect Emily was coded as autistic, and I’m unsure if that was intentional on the author’s part. One of the few bits of genuine historical accuracy that remains in the book is the entitlement obvious in Emily’s attitude towards the people who form the basis of her study.The influence of Bambleby only enhances this, but as it goes on the plot gets somewhat lost underneath all the academic technobabble, so it does not manage to fire on all possible cylinders. Because it feels a difficult thing, especially at the start, to sympathise with her while watching her behaviour. A charmingly whimsical delight, saturated with faerie magic and the equally wonderful magic of humanity…five dazzling, gladdening stars. Even as his nature is to be Fae and therefore cruel, vain and selfish, he was surprisingly caring and thoughtful. There is not much focus on descriptions, but there is enough of it to make the little village come alive in our minds.

Their back-and-forth dry wit mixed with sweet friendship and prickly colleague mannerisms got me straight to the heart. Wendell is beyond description – he starts off as a self-obsessed snoot but his character starts peeling off its layers quite interestingly as the story progresses.Forget dark academia: give me instead this kind of winter-sunshined, sharp-tongued and footnoted academia, full of field trips and grumpy romance and malevolent faeries. I loved this so much and now I'm mad that I can't find another academia-centric faerie fantasy set in early 1900s Scandinavia.

Today’s review is for a super sweet and cosy little fantasy, Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett. This book is utterly charming, although it certainly has dark elements so be aware of that, but the writing is so good. I could feel their frustrations, even if I also recognized their very intentional ethical misjudgment. There is precisely zero acknowledgement at any point in the text that there might, maybe, just slightly, be some Anglo-Irish tensions in 1909.So when she arrives in the hardscrabble village of Hrafnsvik, Emily has no intention of befriending the gruff townsfolk. But the more faeries that come up from under the snow, the more a chilling mystery unfolds within the cottages of Ljosland.

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