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

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Fawcett crafts several fine mysteries, mines plenty of faerie folklore, and blends equal parts girl detective, academic warrior, and Emma Thompson channeling-Austen into this smart and sparkling fantasy. When I started Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries, it was a bit slow and it took time for me to get use to the writing. Today’s review is for a super sweet and cosy little fantasy, Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett.

The prose style also strays very quickly away from even vaguely plausibly her writing a diary to something that feels much closer to a more normal 1st person narration voice.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. It is often said that academia is a fairly lonesome pursuit that leaves little space for some of the more frivolous aspects of life, and that is definitely true for Emily. first read of 2024 and while this was great 3/4 in, the climax for this felt so unfinished i felt like it didn't end properly? It is fun to fully immerse yourself in this, and right from the start the novelty of it is quite welcoming, just to emphasise that it is the kind of story best enjoyed while curled up and feeling cosy. Emily Wilde lives life with a single-minded purpose – she wishes to complete her encyclopaedia of Faerie Folk and does all she can to complete this goal, even if it means suffering the company of other people, the most irritating of whom is her colleague and rival Wendell Bambleby.

Reading Emily thoughts is refreshing, Shadow is adorable and Em and Wendell are opposite but they make an amazing pair and complemented each other amazingly! There is not much focus on descriptions, but there is enough of it to make the little village come alive in our minds.I’ve seen some really good reviews of it around and it definitely felt like the sort of read I really want at the moment – bit of fantasy, bit of romance (you kind of have to squint) and it’s also a historical novel as well. The story mainly features Emily and Wendell Bambleby, another professor from Cambridge who invites himself along on her expedition and who she is frustratedly annoyed at because she’s sure he’s trying to take credit for her work. They start off a little distrustful of Emily, sure that she will bring the wrath of the Hidden Ones on them, but the more time they spend with her, the more they come to hope that Emily might indeed be their salvation. A genius scholar and foremost expert on faeries, Emily Wilde is writing the world’s first encyclopedia of faerie lore. I soundly reject this idea as it is not mentioned or alluded to anywhere in the text or in the book descriptions.