Book Review: Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries

When Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett came out a few months ago I immediately thought the cover was so beautiful. The synopsis sounded really interesting too so I picked it up on one of my Barnes & Noble trips back in the spring and just read it last week.

The novel takes place in the early 1900s and follows Emily Wilde, a Cambridge professor who is an expert in faeries. She is researching and compiling information for the first ever encyclopaedia of faeries. She heads to a small village called Hrafnsvik, which is described as a sort of small Nordic village. There she hopes to learn more information for her book and uncover more information about the Hidden Ones – a group of faeries that very little is known about. Her colleague, Wendell Bambleby ends up joining her, who she finds annoyingly charming and insufferable. Will he end up helping her or getting in the way of her research of uncovering faerie secrets? And does Wendell have secrets of his own?

I’ve heard mixed reviews about this book, but as I already owned it I really wanted to give it a try. I did enjoy it, but it is slow and the slow burn romance is very slow. However, the novel had just enough whimsy, humor, and charm that it kept me reading and wanting to know what would happen next. This is the start of a series, so I’m hoping that book 2 will pick up the pace a little more and that the slow burn romance will also pick up.

Overall, I did enjoy the book and really liked Emily and Wendell! It is slow but there is something beautiful and whimsical about the world Emily finds herself in.