Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries is a wonderfully engaging fantasy series starter by Heather Fawcett. Released 10th Jan 2023 by Penguin Random House on their Del Rey imprint, it's 336 pages and is available in hardcover, audio, and ebook formats. It's worth noting that the ebook format has a handy interactive table of contents as well as interactive links and references throughout. I've really become enamored of ebooks with interactive formats lately.
This is such a beautifully written, appealing, and entertaining book. It's a fantasy homage to the Victorian/Edwardian naturalist field studies of the period and it's jolly well done, complete with footnotes and observations galore. The titular protagonist, young fiercely bookish Dr. Emily Wilde is ferociously intelligent and academic, but mostly at sea when it comes to navigating interpersonal relationships. She finds it easier to confine herself to codifying the unspoken rules which govern the fair folk than to understand the same with her fellow humans.
There is (naturally) an element of slow-burn romance in the form of an undisguised frenemy, the exasperating (but devilishly handsome) Dr. Wendell Brambleby, well-born, charming, and infuriatingly indolent.
For fans of Katherine Arden, Natasha Pulley, Cat Rambo, and Catherynne Valente, this book will recall the wonderful feelings from those authors' books. It's not derivative in any way, but it *is* magical. I also enjoyed that despite being set in the early Edwardian period, the author doesn't have any problems dispensing with the more annoyingly rigid social mores of the time. Dr. Wilde is refreshingly forward thinking and the book simply ignores the inconvenient proscriptions against women being unchaperoned and engaging in academic careers on a level playing field with their male colleagues.
Five stars. Gorgeous. Looking forward to finding out what comes next.
Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.
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