Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries

 This originally appeared at The Irresponsible Reader.

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What’s Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries About? 

Emily Wilde is a dryadologist. Imagine, if you will, what post-Darwin scientists and naturalists were doing for the study of plants and animals in the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries; or what Carter and the rest were doing in Egypt; but dryadologists are studying fairies (oh, in this world, they are as real as the tomb of Tutankhamun—she’s not a literary theorist). Humans have been dealing with fairies for centuries, but what we know about them is really limited. Mostly left to legends, tales told around the fire or in an inn—where a third or fourth-hand account is rare and as close to an eyewitness as most people will ever get. Emily and her counterparts throughout the world are seeking to bring that to an end. She has a position at Cambridge but is hoping her current project is the kind of thing that will secure her tenure and allow her to further her research. 

Her project is the first comprehensive Encyclopedia of Fairies (hence the title). She could publish what she has now and probably receive scholarly acclaim—and tenure. But she’s driven. She’s a completist. And, to be honest, she has a little bit of an ego and she wants more than probable acclaim. So she rents a small shack in a Norwegian village for a few months to try to find, interact with, and document the least-understood fairies in the world. The northern Hidden Ones (both the common and regal varieties) are powerful and secretive. They don’t interact much with humans—and when they do, it’s generally bad for the humans. If Emily can be the first to get any scholarly research done, it will definitely put her on the map. 

Sadly, as good as she is at dealing with and understanding Fairy, Emily is bad with humans. She has no people skills, is aware of it, and doesn’t care. But in this inhospitable climate, she really needs help to survive—much less to learn a lot about the Hidden Ones. 

Thankfully (?), soon after her arrival, a colleague/competitor—and her only friend—gatecrashes her trip and takes up residence in her shack with her. Wendell Bambleby is the very picture of a Victorian gentleman-scholar. He’s a charmer, and soon has the villagers eating out of his hand. He’s also pampered and demanding (would probably have been considered a bit of a dandy at the time)—and has a really hard time not wrapping his head around things like cooking for himself, working to keep the fire burning, etc. He’s decided that he’s going to collaborate with Emily (not really caring if she agrees) and that their work in Norway will be the thing to help him reclaim some academic respectability following a scandal. 

He may be under a cloud, but Wendell has connections and can open doors for Emily to get her the audience she really needs. So she accepts his proposal to collaborate, assuming she’s going to do almost all of the work. 

Things ensue. I really can’t say more than that. 

Poe 

The first fairy that Emily meets is a young brownie—she ends up referring to him as Poe. It’s great to see her in action with him. it shows that she does know what she’s doing—we don’t just have to take her word for it (not that we have any reason to think she’s lying, but it’s good to know). 

Poe really ends up showing us so much about Emily—and other characters, too. He’s ultimately so integral and important to the novel—and in a very real sense, not important to the plot in any way. But through his interactions (both that the reader sees on the page and those that happen “off-screen”) with various characters, so much of the plot becomes possible and the reader gains a whole lot of insight. Really, he was well, and cleverly, used by Fawcett. I can’t say it better without spending a few hundred spoiler-filled words, but the more I think about him, the more impressed I am by Fawcett. 

Knowing More than Emily 

Around the time—probably a little before—I figured out that the story of the novel isn’t really what you think it is, I figured out a couple of things that Emily is utterly blind to for a very long time. 

Knowing more than a protagonist can be frustrating—I spend a lot of time yelling at detectives in mystery novels in particular. But sometimes, it can be fun watching them catch up to the reader. Fawcett’s able to draw humor from us knowing things that Emily doesn’t. It also helps us empathize with both Emily and other characters as we see her work through various situations and conversations. 

And then, when Emily catches up with the reader—and reality—it’s all the more satisfying. Most/all of what we know that she doesn’t really wouldn’t be that believable if we learned it when she does. We get to spend many pages urging, “Come on, come on, come on…open your eyes/pay attention/etc.” And then, finally, cheer when she does. It’s the closest many readers will get to the position of a sportsball fan yelling at their TV to communicate to someone in a stadium miles/states away. 

Slamming on the Brakes 

I did have one significant problem with this book. As part of her research—part of her life, really—Emily specializes in stories about faeries. She shares some of them as part of her journal. It makes sense, they serve both the character and the overall novel. They’re truly fitting. 

However. 

It was like slamming the brakes on. Everything that had been building, all the tension, the momentum, the development, and so on all came to a rapid stop. And then picked up again after the stories. It reminded me of a time in Kevin Hearne’s Hammered when everything stopped for some of the characters to tell stories. As fun as those stories were, it really made that novel hard to get through (that series went on for 6 more books, two spin-off series, and a number of novellas and short stories—so the jarring stop was obviously not too catastrophic). 

If the transition to them had been smoother—or maybe they had been more spread out. Just something, I probably wouldn’t have mentioned them—or I’d have talked about what a great way it was for us to get an understanding of the Northern Fairies without an infodump. Instead, it came across as a stumble—one that the novel recovered from nicely. But in the moment, it really bugged me. 

So, what did I think about Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries? 

Stick with me for a minute—I could tell from the opening pages that this was a well-composed and well-structured novel full of fantastic world-building. But it took longer for me to move beyond appreciation and admiration for what was being done to really care about it. I did, though, the book started out slowly and picked up momentum as it went—and as it did, I got more and more invested (and my appreciation and admiration increased, too). Somewhere around the mid-point, maybe a little later, I was as invested as is possible and only my notes tell me it took time for that. 

I think I just used too many words to say—it’s a slow burn of a novel in almost every conceivable way. Not unlike Emily’s rented shack—it takes a while for a fire to really start heating the place, but once it has time, it’s nice and toasty warm. 

There’s a lot I’d like to talk about, but I’m not sure how. I can see later installments being easier, but so much of the novel is about beginnings. To really talk about it would be to discuss the last 20% of the novel. And no one wants me to do that. 

Just because of my own prejudices, I could spend a few paragraphs on her dog, Shadow, too. As much as he deserves them, I’m going to leave it with “he’s a very good boy.” I hope to see more of him in the books to come, too. 

This book is rich in character, story, world-building (and world-revealing), magic, and subtlety. I’m not sure if you can be rich in subtlety, but Fawcett pulls that off. This is absolutely something I recommend and imagine the next few months are going to be filled with people gushing over this. Readers of this post might as well get in line now to be one of those gushing. 

I'm probably a biased reviewer but this hit the spot for me on so many levels. 4.5/5.

I went into it completely blind but having heard generally good things about the book. Immediately, I was immediately caught by the trope of “female academic in a (sometimes fantasy) field in an AU of historical Europe”, which is something I've generally enjoyed in the past starting with Elizabeth Peters's Amelia Peabody series (studying Egyptology), Deanna Raybourn's Veronica Speedwell series (studying butterflies), and also Marie Brennan's The Memoirs of Lady Trent series (studying dragons). All of these female academics, as well as Emily Wilde, are generally curmudgeonly and a little prickly, with a bit of the modern 21st century “strong independent woman” vibe, but tampered with a hilariously sardonic voice that often makes their perspectives very enjoyable to read. Plus, most of these female academics are generally too busy ruminating about their field of choice in the book that there isn't too much time to keep dwelling on female independence and hitting the reader over the head with it - I prefer messages like this to be a normalized background theme rather than being too on the nose. The male love interests in these books always develop a healthy respect for the female protagonist (primarily because there would be no realistic way she could fall in love with a person who didn't), and having to keep a respectful distance from them and letting the love line develop on both people's terms.

So all that was done and great. It was only half way through that it suddenly struck me for the first time that this book was... basically a retelling of Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones, which also happens to be one of my favourite books of all time (and was before the film even came out). I later learnt that this was confirmed by the author in an interview, but I was really happy that the parallels were subtle enough that it took me half a book to figure it out, but obvious enough that I could feel the strong influence for sure even before I read any interview with the author. I've read so many HMC retellings at this point and feel that the best ones are the ones that don't market themselves as such, so I was delighted that this came through so subtly and so creatively too. As the plot develops, the book's parallels with HMC became more and more obvious, but I wasn't mad, and frankly I enjoyed the book even more after that.

The narrative of this book is generally quite slice of life, as it should be given that it is a journal of an academic in the field. There is a lot of information about the faeries in her world, but I thought it wasn't too info-dumpy and gave a lot of substance to the world-building. In particular, I enjoyed the kinds of faeries that inhabited this world too. Faeries are a pretty popular fantasy race to include in books these days, but they're often just another variation of the uber-hot elf trope. But in this one, faeries are much closer to the ones you might come across in actual fairy tales from the centuries ago. They're at best tricky to deal with, but can be downright dangerous, horrifying, cruel (and not in a oMg-sO-hOt way), and sadistic. Some of them are even described as looking like nightmare fuel. I love that, not everything and everyone has to be hot humans in a fantasy romance book.

And then, of course, there's the romance. I liked a lot about how understated it was, there wasn't any particularly huge dramatic moments, and we don't have the female protagonist conveniently but unrealistically not guessing a lot of things about the male love interest. She's intelligent and she's a scholar, so of course realistically she's going to have suspicions about certain things, not least his feelings for her long before he declares it, rather than be caught by surprise. It sacrifices the drama of the moment a bit, but I much prefer this.

So overall I really enjoyed this one. I am a little worried about the sequel though - often times a book that uses a tried-and-true formula from another book tends to flounder when it has to carry on from there onto a sequel because then they're on a bit on untested ground, but nevertheless I'll definitely be reading it when it comes out next year.