Review : Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries (Emily Wilde #1) by Heather Fawcett
A curmudgeonly professor journeys to a small town in the far north to study faerie folklore and discovers dark fae magic, friendship, and love in the start of a heartwarming and enchanting new fantasy series.
Cambridge professor Emily Wilde is good at many things: She is the foremost expert on the study of faeries. She is a genius scholar and a meticulous researcher who is writing the world’s first encyclopaedia of faerie lore. But Emily Wilde is not good at people. She could never make small talk at a party–or even get invited to one. And she prefers the company of her books, her dog, and the Fair Folk.
So when she arrives in the hardscrabble village of Hrafnsvik, Emily has no intention of befriending the gruff townsfolk. Nor does she care to spend time with another new arrival: her dashing and insufferably handsome academic rival Wendell Bambleby, who manages to charm the townsfolk, get in the middle of Emily’s research, and utterly confound and frustrate her.
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? To find the answer, she’ll have to unlock the greatest mystery of all–her own heart.
I GOT THE BOOK FROM THE LIBRARY.
Review:
Dear Heather Fawcett,
I liked your book quite a bit, but I will be honest the fantasy storyline and settings just did not have too much substance to it for me. I guess low stakes sounds about right (and also a little boring), but the beginning of the romance ended up being an unexpected delight.
The blurb gives a good set up. In 1909 alternative Britain there is a Cambridge where women scholars are apparently accepted and can even be professors. Emily is one of them and her field of study are fairies. Emily is very smart and I guess your typical scholar. I said a typical scholar, but I guess I may as well say a *stereotypical scholar*, because while I did my fair share of studying in my life, I never worked in academia and I have not known many college professors to decide what a real scholar sounds like and looks like :).
Emily wants to write an encyclopedia of the fairies and she sets out on an expedition to the small village where she can uncover the secrets of the Hidden fairies. I feel as if I am reciting the blurb here, but I just think that this was one of the stories where the initial set up cannot be ignored.
Very early in the book Emily also gets a letter from one of her colleagues, Wendel Bambleby, and readers and Emily realize that Wendel may soon join her on this expedition. Initially she huffs and puffs about it and I confess that for a page or two I almost bought Emily’s comments about him. I thought oh, another obnoxious man who may tolerate a woman researcher in the same institution where he works but still looks down at her.
Only, if one even reads Emily’s initial comments, one already may see that she respects him as a scientist and a researcher and they coauthored a book together.
Emily is not exactly an unreliable narrator where the facts of the story are concerned, but as the blurb tells you she is not good at people, more precisely she is not good at social interactions. Sometimes she cannot read other people correctly and she herself may not know/ understand what she is supposed to do in a specific social situation. So she does misread Wendel several times but to me their communications quickly became charming even if on the outside it did not sound so, because personally I had no doubt that Wendel cared for her deeply. She cared for him too, she just had to understand herself.
I loved that while Emily may not have been good at social interactions, she was very smart and very competent and while she was way more competent at her job than *with people*, she understood what she wanted eventually. Or should we say she almost did! The book does not stop with a cliffhanger, but there are two more books I think already out and their love story did not arrive at the conclusion it will hopefully arrive at eventually. The author left them in a good place though.
You will ask me about the fantasy storyline and all I can say, well it was there. Fairies are there and there is even a little danger at the end, but that’s about it.
B for romance. C for fantasy
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If you continue with the series, I’ll be curious about your thoughts.
I will . I placed holds on both in the library, but it shows me couple of months wait . These are the books I can easily wait for though :)