I’ve been a fan of Heather Fawcett for years (BC based author!) and I’m so glad to see so much buzz about Emily Wilde this year! If you liked this one, definitely go check out her YA series, Even the Darkest Stars, which I also love. Besides that she has a few middle grade books that are still a lot of fun. I’ve seen Emily described as “cozy fantasy” and I would describe all her books that way.

Because her last few books have all been middle grade, I assumed Emily Wilde was also middle grade. I was delighted to learn that it’s actually her first adult fantasy! It reads a bit more like YA, but there’s definitely some violence in here. It’s very infrequent and not gratuitous, but who knew such handsome faeries could be so casually violent when they get angry. 

Anyways, let’s get into it – Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries is set in the fictional country of Ljosland (although Google informed me this is also a small village in Norway). It’s appropriate because Ljosland is a cold, northern country that made me think of Finland or Iceland (or Norway). Emily is a young professor who has been working for many years writing an encyclopaedia of faeries and this is her last field trip to research “the hidden ones”. 

Initially she finds it hard to fit in in cold Ljosland and is not sure why the villagers have rejected her. Things get even more challenging when her enigmatic colleague Wendell Bambleby arrives at her cottage and she fears he has come to piggyback off her research and success. However, the two soon discover that there is something nefarious going on between the hidden ones and the villagers and Emily must apply all her research of faeries to help protect the villagers.

This is quite different from most other fantasy novels I’ve read and even though I found it a bit slow moving, I really enjoyed it. I’ve always said that Heather Fawcett is great at creating setting and atmosphere and this novel was no exception. She really excels at writing these desolate, cold landscapes and despite the chill, I love to escape into them. What I liked about this book is that Fawcett trusts her reader to be able to infer information and context without spelling it out for them. This world is very similar to our own world (though set in 1909), with only subtle changes in terms of geography and the existence of faeries. Her world building is strong and I felt like I walked straight into this slightly kooky world that was fully realized without a lot of tedious info dumping. In short – she’s good at showing, not telling. A skill many fantasy authors have not been able to hone.

Emily is a great character. She’s relatable, yet flawed. She’s intelligent, capable, and quick-witted, yet she recognizes when she should ask for help. She makes lots of smart decisions and plays hero to several of the villagers, yet she also makes mistakes and requires a rescue of her own. Despite being set in a fantastical world of faeries, she’s incredibly genuine and believable, which I think will appeal to a lot of readers.

Like any good fantasy, this story also has a side-romance. It’s definitely subtle, but this is one of my favourite types of romances. It doesn’t dominate the storyline, rather Fawcett focuses on relationship building, while weaving a simple element of romance between the characters. Their love is tangential to the story, but makes it so much more meaningful because of it. Any good series author will also weave ongoing plotlines throughout multiple novels, which Fawcett has done, so I can’t wait to see where this relationship goes in the next book.

So overall, there was a lot to like about this book, but I do have some criticisms as well, mostly with the ending. The book moves along at a pretty slow pace – I didn’t mind it, but overall I thought it had some pacing issues. What I didn’t like was how quickly everything wrapped up at the end of the book. I felt like the story ended too quickly and was not resolved. There’s no real conclusion to the conflict the village was having with the faeries and it seemed to me like Emily and Wendell were just disappearing off into the night without accomplishing their objectives. Otherwise, it was a really fun book. I’ll definitely be picking up book 2 when it releases and may now have to get to a few of her backlist books that I haven’t read yet!

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Spoilers Below

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What was the most frustrating to me was how Emily stopped the poisoning plot because “it didn’t feel right”, basically because it wasn’t in line with the faeries stories and she didn’t want to see things ended that way. So instead they run away and leave things even more unresolved in my opinion. As a reader, it just didn’t feel very satisfying. I was hoping to see some resolution in Emily and Wendell’s relationship as well, but that one I could accept because it will be continued in book 2. It doesn’t sound like we’ll be returning to Ljosland, so the poor village is going to be more or less left on their own. Overall, I just felt like I had whiplash from how quickly the story ended and it left me feeling a bit unsettled and incomplete. I would have liked to see a bit more closure to the main plot points. It just felt a bit sloppy.