Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries

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.