Amy Imogene Reads's Reviews > Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries

I knew this book was going to be an all-time favorite by the first few chapters. Calling all fans of the Fair Folk, journal entry narration, and truly fun banter...

Concept: ★★★★★
Narrative voice:★★★★★
Plot/Pacing:★★★★★

Emily Wilde is an intrepid and fearless Fae scholar. Documenting and studying the fairy folk throughout the world is a singular profession. While the folk have been proven in multiple cases, it's a dangerous pursuit and the academia surrounding it is wreathed in disappearances, contradictions, and gray areas.

Emily Wilde has no time for that nonsense. It's her calling, her obsession—and she's damn good at it.

She's assembling an encyclopedia of the world's different types of Fair Folk, and she's nearly done. All she needs is confirmation on the elusive folk of the northern Arctic community of Ljosland, Scandinavia.

Armed with her huge dog companion, Shadow, and her notes, Emily arrives in the rural community.

She quickly finds herself on the wrong foot. (Did we forget to mention that, while scholastically brilliant, Emily is terrible at human interaction and emotions? She managed to offend the entire community on her first day onsite. Whoops.)

It's good thing that her coworker—okay, the beautiful bane of her existence and scholarly nemesis—surprises her by arriving in town within the week.

Wendell Bambleby is universally loved, overwhelmingly lazy, and the most stunning man Emily has ever laid eyes on. They have neighboring offices at Cambridge and have a collegiate petty rivalry that they both get perverse enjoyment out of enacting.

With winter quickly settling in, the community on edge, and a history of missing children quickly becoming a present-day concern, Emily and Wendell are in for more than they bargained for...

Aghhhhhhhhhhh I loved this story so much, y'all. I have ZERO complaints. I don't even have small, annoying critiques. All I have is love and a newfound obsession for female characters who are hopelessly, utterly oblivious to social cues.

Emily might be brilliant, but she's also unbelievably obtuse. I couldn't get enough of the situational humor and delight surrounding a main character who was both ruthlessly brilliant in each scene AND somehow comedically dumb when it came to her social interactions. That combo was flawless, and I will gladly read Emily's journal entries forevermore.

I loved the journal entry narrative style. I loved the banter between Wendell and Emily. I loved Shadow, the lovable-yet-terrifyingly huge black dog. I loved the footnotes and endless references to other scholars documenting the Fair Folk and having adventures throughout the world. (Could we get a spin-off series on Grey?? She sounds epic!) I loved the fae plot and the historical lean—it's refreshingly new in today's fae/folk story canon that has traditionally lived in the modern-day urban and high fantasy spaces.

My only complaint is that now we must wait for the sequel. I hope this series is long and fruitful—given that this book opened us up to entire world of scholarly pursuit of different types of fae across the globe, I see no reason that Emily and Wendell couldn't globetrot us from adventure to adventure for books to come.

(I CAN'T WAIT)

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