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A review by amelianotthepilot
Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett
medium-paced
- Strong character development? No
3.0
Although I love the cover of this book I find the title a marketing nightmare-for years I saw this and assumed it was an actual little kids encyclopedia and did not understand why the book girlies were hyped about it. After reading it i’m still eh.
The story is written as academic Emily Wilde’s field journal as she goes on a new expedition to discover fairies in Scandinavia. In this world fairies are known about and avidly studied in universities but still largely regarded as mischievous tricksters that the general populace leave alone. Emily is an academic from Cambridge and is attempting to discover proof of a new species while working on her latest book. She and her colleague Wendell Brambley end up entangled in a small wintery town’s fae community drama and an adventure ensues with vague romance.
I think the characters are interesting and the world building fascinating however the dedication to writing the whole story from the perspective of a scholar’s field journal left it extremelyyyyy boring and bland and very young sounding. This limited perspective made the romance mostly left to the readers imagination. I found the plot twists particularly boring as our main character is very clever and would often just state things as they are. Although I do appreciate this dedication to writing an erudite character who’s actually is smart and useful and not just supposed to be smart, I often found Emily’s character sorta boring since she solely focuses on her research and rarely mentions emotions, romance, or social interactions. It could be argued this is because it’s supposed to be academic notes but that is ridiculous since she often mentions things that are not academic related.
I also disliked the one chapter we get from Wendell’s perspective. I found it quite lazy. It’s exciting to get the love interests perspective but I think that should either be a consistent choice to have every other chapter from a different POV or do it as a seperate novella or just tumblr release.
Although the story was fun I found the climax events escalated entirely to fast and honestly resulted in the first dumb choices of our “smart” main character. The climax events also were resolved entirely too quickly and easily.
There is also virtually no character development.
I did however enjoy when the human characters experienced fae lands. It had a very visceral feeling to the descriptions and woozy character actions. I also absolutely love the fae world building it’s fascinating.
The story is written as academic Emily Wilde’s field journal as she goes on a new expedition to discover fairies in Scandinavia. In this world fairies are known about and avidly studied in universities but still largely regarded as mischievous tricksters that the general populace leave alone. Emily is an academic from Cambridge and is attempting to discover proof of a new species while working on her latest book. She and her colleague Wendell Brambley end up entangled in a small wintery town’s fae community drama and an adventure ensues with vague romance.
I think the characters are interesting and the world building fascinating however the dedication to writing the whole story from the perspective of a scholar’s field journal left it extremelyyyyy boring and bland and very young sounding. This limited perspective made the romance mostly left to the readers imagination. I found the plot twists particularly boring as our main character is very clever and would often just state things as they are. Although I do appreciate this dedication to writing an erudite character who’s actually is smart and useful and not just supposed to be smart, I often found Emily’s character sorta boring since she solely focuses on her research and rarely mentions emotions, romance, or social interactions. It could be argued this is because it’s supposed to be academic notes but that is ridiculous since she often mentions things that are not academic related.
I also disliked the one chapter we get from Wendell’s perspective. I found it quite lazy. It’s exciting to get the love interests perspective but I think that should either be a consistent choice to have every other chapter from a different POV or do it as a seperate novella or just tumblr release.
Although the story was fun I found the climax events escalated entirely to fast and honestly resulted in the first dumb choices of our “smart” main character. The climax events also were resolved entirely too quickly and easily.
There is also virtually no character development.
I did however enjoy when the human characters experienced fae lands. It had a very visceral feeling to the descriptions and woozy character actions. I also absolutely love the fae world building it’s fascinating.