Book Review: Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett

This is entirely out of the realm of my usual reading material, but I adored this little book. Perhaps partly because it can fall into the academia subgenre, which is becoming my favorite type of novel to read. Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries is a fantasy novel about a scholar studying elusive faeries in a frigid climate. I am not an avid reader of fantasy, so I was hesitant to pick this one up, but it kept calling to me, and I succumbed. And I’m so glad I did. I went to Barnes and Noble and paid full market price for it on a whim instead of my usual habit of thrifting used books; that’s how much it called to me. 

I fell in love with the writing style from the very first page. Literally my only complaint in that regard is that Fawcett used the phrase “to my chagrin” two times too many in the span of a few pages, but that singular fault was in an otherwise immaculately written book. I don’t think the writing style is for everyone, since it was intentionally pretentious in a scholarly way and dated, but it added to the humor for me and I could tell that every word was thoughtfully included. It was also written in an epistolary format, composed of Emily’s journal entries, so it has fairly low stakes, but I didn’t mind. 

I enjoyed Wendell Bambleby’s humor entirely too much. The one chapter in his voice and the excerpts of his journal at the end was in a style distinct from Emily Wilde’s, and had me grinning the entire time. I don’t think I would have enjoyed the novel as much as I did without his banter with Emily and his general sense of humor.

I had to really think to find anything I disliked, but if I had to nitpick, Emily Wilde’s character did seem a bit cold and too anti-humanitarian. She claims her rescue attempts of other people are done mainly for academic discovery rather than from concern over anyone’s well-being (or at least she claims the latter is only a small impetus). But I’m telling myself that’s based on her narration bias, since she does claim she wants to remain detached and purely academic, but her actions belie her words, so I hope she’s just fooling herself. If that’s not the case, she might be truly unlikeable. And at the end climax, she’s the one who needs rescuing from the faeries (I’m trying to avoid spoilers), but of course her friends’ plan is faulty and she’s the only one who is possibly intelligent or capable enough to rescue herself. Granted, she is considered to be the greatest expert on faeries in that world, but it did grate me a bit since I don’t like that trope of the main character being superior all the time. But even the annoying trope was well done relatively, so I can forgive it.

Despite that, it was a genuine delight to read, and I look forward to continuing the series.