Book Review: Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett
“One doesn’t need magic if one knows enough stories.”
ISBN - ISBN-13 : 978-0356519142 | Orbit | Jan 2023
SPOILER ALERT
I’m a bit behind the curve with this one – it’s the first book of a series of three which have been bestsellers and it has over 13,000 reviews on Amazon. I don’t normally read books about faeries but I saw something about it also being ‘academic romance’. I’ve heard about academic romance being a bit of a trend within romantic literature and I was interested in what that might look like because I’ve been working on a romance about Cambridge academics for ages and had got it out recently to dust it off and see what I can make of it (more on that another time).
Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries is a cosy fantasy involving two academics, supposedly from Cambridge in the 1920s (see below) visiting a far-off ice-bound land in the far North (similar to Iceland – the letters and language seem to indicate the author had Iceland in mind). The protagonist, Emily Wilde seems to me to be on the autistic spectrum (although I don’t think this is explicitly stated) which makes her really interesting. She’s someone who struggles with intimacy and personal contact and hides herself in her academic research.
I really loved this book. Because it’s an academic romance, Emily’s analysing and categorising the faeries and gathering data about them which makes it feel more solid and less twee, cutesy or childish than a straightforward fantasy book – almost more like magic realism.
It was also cosy and pretty and imaginative, and had that kind of weirdness you get in fairy stories – things that don’t make sense and odd things that can’t be, like the way you can’t really see faeries when you look at them face on but you can only really see them side on. The author really gives us a sense of them being from another dimension. And there is also loads of real jeopardy, and some gothic and grim bits to lend a frisson of excitement.
I don’t read a lot of fantasy these days. It’s a massive sector of the market at the moment but I’ve been put off exploring it further because I’m gathering a lot of it is very explicit or dark and that wouldn’t be my cup of tea. But I really enjoyed the very gentle, burgeoning romance between the two main characters. It's very hands-off, which makes it all the sweeter, almost Austenesque. And because Emily is (probably) on the spectrum, she struggles to interpret some of Wendell's looks and actions. I loved the line where she was surprised by her warm feelings, “my ridiculous heart gave a leap and would have answered him instantly, if it was the organ in charge of my decision-making.”
We’re not at all surprised that to discover that Wendell Bambleby is actually a fairy – I mean his name and ridiculous good looks just give it away from page one. He’s so sweet and, despite being a bit of a spoiled brat, is so devoted to Emily and she’s so utterly clueless it’s actually quite funny.
There are plenty of laugh-out-loud moments and wonderful turns of phrase. Heather Fawcett clearly has a very dry sense of humour which really suits Emily Wilde. She’s also fantastically imaginative.
I loved the way she painted the frozen landscape and some of her prose is beautiful - “runic scatter of bird prints”, “A narrow fox darted across our path, a starling clutched in its mouth, sparing us a dismissive glance as it slunk back into the velvet shadow.” Nice.
I do have one little moan, though. I know this is a fantasy book so anything’s possible, but if you’re going to bring real places into it, I feel like that juxtaposition of the real world with the fantasy world would be more interesting and convincing if the descriptions of the real place were at all realistic. It was pretty weird that Emily is only 25 and yet she’s a professor at Cambridge in the 1920s. I don't see why we need two such utterly implausible things – that anyone would be a professor at Cambridge at 25, and that Cambridge would have any female professors back then when women couldn’t even get degrees (they were allowed to study and take the exams – and pay the fees obviously – but not get the degrees until 1948). Wouldn’t it be more interesting to tell the truth? That she’d be the cleverest person in the department but be barred from ever becoming a professor? Also Cambridge doesn’t have “quadrangles”, but “courts” and there is no ‘campus’ at Cambridge – it’s a series of colleges and other buildings scattered throughout the city. I know this doesn’t matter – it’s a fantasy book – but if you’re going to refer to real places and real times, make them real. Why say ‘Cambridge’ if you’re going to treat facts so lightly? Why not make up a university?
However, that really is only a tiny moan. This book genuinely had me hooked. I generally only read for a few minutes at bedtime (for want of any other time), but every now and then I get a book where I think ‘ooh I might just read a chapter with my coffee today’ and this was one of those. A high recommendation indeed. It’s lovely when you do find a book that you’re thinking about during the day and really wondering what’s going to happen next. I can see why it’s been a bestseller.
I don’t know if I’ll read the next one, mostly because my TBR is very long and it’s not my genre, but I would really recommend it if you like imaginative, cosy romance and have any kind of tolerance for fantasy.
I will leave you with one last thought from Emily Wilde: “One doesn’t need magic if one knows enough stories.”
