Review by wardenred - Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries

wardenred 's review for:

Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett

4.0

adventurous funny informative inspiring tense slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: No

One doesn’t need magic if one knows enough stories.

I think I expected more from this book, but I did enjoy what I got. There's such a strong sense of setting here, and it's precisely the kind of setting I love: a tiny community on the snow-covered edge of the world, surrounded by forests and mountains and frozen lakes, all of it touched with fairy magic. I enjoyed the way the fairy lore was handled: the academic approach to it, the relationship between the fairy magic/tradition and story tropes, and how close the fairies here are to what I expect from them based on folklore: fickle and cold-hearted and dangerously beautiful. The second half of the book was particularly strong in terms of this.

I also very much liked the mixture of cozy fantasy and fairy folk horror, or at least the concept of it. In practice, the coziness part kind of kept falling short for me, probably because of the amount of friction between Emily and the villagers at the beginning. Sure, it wasn't unreasonable of them to expect her to learn a bit about their customs and traditions before coming to stay. At the same time, it also wasn't unreasonable to assume that maybe those customs are, you know, foreign for her, so why not spell everything out before taking offense without explaining the faux pas? Communication is good! Also, Emily is very clearly portrayed as neudorivergent and struggles with societal expectations even in a familiar setting. That is something I very much relate to and sympathize with, so it hurt to see her given the cold shoulder for not living up to a standard outside of her scope. Which is why, even once the bridges were mended, it was difficult for me to truly get into the cozy parts. I kind of kept a grudge. :D And then there's also the fact that I somehow expect cozy fantasy books to have kind characters, and Emily is smart and interesting and complex, but I wouldn't call her particularly kind.

From the summary and some of the reviews I've seen, I expected the romantic storyline to be more prominent. As it was, it wasn't exactly subtle and it's certainly present at the forefront of the story most of the time. Emily and Wendell have a lot of fun moments together; taken in isolation, they're great exampls of the kind of grumpy x sunshine dynamic I tend to enjoy in fiction. But I just can't see them moving from that into an actual relationship for some reason. Which, much like my definition of cozy fiction, is largely a personal taste/preference thing, of course.

What objectively made it a bit difficult to maintain immersion was the journal entries format. On one hand, I get why the author chose it for this story over a regular first person narration. It fits the story itself, and it also allowed for that one very fun chapter around the middle—you know which one, if you've read the book. On the other hand, the amount of dialogue and the abundance of moment that felt just like regular first person narration... well, like I said, immersion got tricky. The idea behind the format is good, but the execution could use more polish, I suppose.

Content Warnings