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

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It’s supposed to be a slow burn, but throughout the first half of the book, Emily barely shows any romantic interest in Wendell while he’s off flirting and sleeping with other girls.

The characters are wonderfully good-humoured and forgiving, even when things aren’t going their way, and the dialogue is peppered with a wittiness that sets a smile upon your face that refuses to budge. If you’re looking for a cozy fantasy, with some low stakes, but plenty of fun and folklore to keep you entertained then I cannot recommend this enough. Chilling, packed with lore, and a slow burn, Emily Wilde’s Encyclopedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett is the type of book I’ve been looking for. The Writing- For starters, it's painfully overwritten, it's pretentious and feels exceedingly obnoxious.I sincerely hope that Emily's cold and narrow-minded character was not meant to represent a community of diverse individuals because this representation would have been more harmful than helpful. Nothing annoys me more than faeries that are so beautifully mysterious and so cruel that they feel detached from emotions. Academic grumps they may be, but these two have a friendship that makes me wish for someone that would battle faerie assassins for me. Cambridge professor Emily Wilde is good at many things: She is the foremost expert on the study of faeries. Emily is a scholar who struggles when it comes to socialising, unless the topic surrounds faeries as she’s dedicated her life thus far to studying them.

She does plenty of field work, tons of studying, and she views faeries through a very scientific lens. I feel like this review may ruffle some feathers but we all have to keep it real and this is just my opinion but if you loved this book I am genuinely happy for you but I suggest you keep scrolling bc I am going to go there. He shows some level of initiative toward the climax of the book but never enough for me to actually care about him or believe that he's capable of fully caring about anyone else. Follow the lights into the woods and dance with the fae under Emily’s careful guidance—just be sure not to get carried away. A charmingly whimsical delight, saturated with faerie magic and the equally wonderful magic of humanity…five dazzling, gladdening stars.If that were actually the case, I would take serious issue with this entirely cliched and narrow representation of people who live with this condition. The joy of this is the more I read, the more clear it becomes why Wendell spends so much time around Emily. There wasn't much of it here and I didn't expect it to be, but I don't get why the author thought it would be a good idea for Wendell to sleep with every girl in the village, in the same cottage he shared with Emily, and then propose to her later on, literally out of nowhere.

What I love most about her is how apathetic and absorbed in her work she can be, although this does not mean she lacks any emotions, only a few morals. I will be proceeding with my breakdown as if she is a neurotypical woman with obvious social anxiety as the text suggests. That last point may seem trivial, and in fact it took me a while to notice when reading, beyond a vague sense of something being deeply off, but once I did realise, it was impossible to ignore. I mentioned that she can be prickly but at the same time she doesn’t mean to give offence, it’s simply that she speaks her mind and sometimes others take umbridge and so reading her thoughts, as she jots the days events down, was so refreshing because quite often she’s baffled and trying to work out where she went wrong. Also, I am NOT the author of More Than a Mom: Living a Full And Balanced Life When Your Child Has Special Needs.I could feel their frustrations, even if I also recognized their very intentional ethical misjudgment. To take a book doing something quite similar, if Fawcett had followed the same approach as Marie Brennan in writing the Lady Trent books, making up a fake country (that we all know is totally England), giving it a made up name and a made up university, however obvious the analogy to real world places, it would have given everything just that bit of plausible deniability necessary to suspend disbelief. 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. If anyone were to claim greater happiness in their careers than I do in poking about sunlit wildwoods for faerie footprints, I should not believe it.

Unfortunately, I am disappointed to say that Emily Wilde failed in most things I look for in a novel. It felt like Heather Fawcett had gotten so caught up in developing her characters and creating atmosphere that she just forgot to flesh that part out and build up to it… Still, I didn’t really care. Emily has traveled all over the world studying various culture's magical beings and the legends and lore surrounding them.

Anachronisms upon anachronisms ensue, giving a whiplash feel of the time and absolute lack of the feel of the place.