Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries

Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries

By Heather Fawcett

Del Ray, 2023. 317 pages. Fiction

In the early 1900s, a curmudgeonly professor journeys to a small town to study faerie folklore, where she discovers dark fae magic, friendship, and love. Cambridge professor Emily Wilde is good at many things: She is the foremost expert on dryadology, the study of faeries. She is a genius scholar and a meticulous researcher who is writing the world's first encylopedia of faerie lore. But Emily Wilde is not good at people. She could never make small talk at a party--much less get invited to one. And she prefers the company of her books, her dog Shadow, and the Fair Folk to that of friends or lovers. So when she arrives in the hardscrabble village of Hransvik, Emily has no intention of befriending the gruff townsfolk. Nor does she care to spend time with another new arrival: the dashing and insufferably handsome Wendell Bambleby, who manages to charm the townsfolk, get in the middle of her research, and utterly confound and frustrate Emily. 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.

This was a really fun novel to read, and I didn't want to put it down. The footnotes were delightful and convincing (are there really all those 19th century scholarly books on faeries?). The author also described things really beautifully, in a cinematic way. I was a little disappointed by the end (but I'm assuming some things get resolved in the next book!) and sometimes in the book, there's a feeling of cold detachment, but I think the author intended that, through her character Emily. Despite this, Emily is a likeable character, and even though he's drastically different from Emily, so is Wendell Bambleby. Definitely an enjoyable, convincing story about humans and their strange interactions with the faerie folk. 

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MGB