Lilibet Bombshell's Reviews > Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries

Emily Wilde is essentially a cultural anthropologist who specializes in ethnographies of fairies. Anthropologists have one job and one job only: to observe and report. It’s the Prime Directive. They are to observe their subjects and then report on them while making as little contact with the subjects as possible. The titular Encyclopaedia Emily Wilde considers her life’s work as she sets out on the journey within this book requires her to go one step further than your standard cultural anthropologist and become an ethnographer: an ethnographer spends a great deal of time researching the subjects of their research before setting out to not only observe and report, but also to make contact (every scientist’s dream is to be the one to make first contact) and learn all manner of things about their subjects and their society with as little cross-contamination between our world and theirs as possible.

Emily Wilde herself was the singular most enjoyable thing about this book, and the only reason I kept reading. She reminded me a great deal of both myself and my sister, owing to my sister being a cultural anthropologist herself and me being a cultural geographer. To female scientists such as ourselves, getting those rare opportunities to write groundbreaking research and getting used to all the men in the room talking over us and around us is something that’s all too familiar. Underestimation is the name of the game, and Emily Wilde is having none of it. When you’re a female scientist you get used to having trust issues and the feelings of having to push yourself to extremes in order to prove you can run with the big names, which are usually all male.

And this is where we have a big problem with the book: I was serious when I said Emily Wilde herself was the only thing I liked about this book. I love just about everything about her, from her passion for her work to her dry, wry banter with the enigmatic and charismatic Wendell Bambleby. I love how she has a very hard time people-ing and enjoys the quiet companionship of her books and her dog, Shadow, over anyone else. Her unimpeachable academic ethics and perseverance would make her my own personal hero, if I were a Cambridge student in this novel.

But this novel is set up as an epistolary novel, meant to be read as journal entries, and that’s where this book fails the most. It never once felt like an epistolary novel to me. The writing is too smooth, too linear, the entries too equal in size, and read too much like a traditional fantasy romance narrative to ever come across as journal entries. It was not only extremely annoying, as the promised epistolary format was one of the aspects of the book that enticed me the most, but it felt like since it was supposed to be in an epistolary format it ended up looking like a sloppy epistolary novel. Either way, it’s false advertising.

I also didn’t enjoy the character of Wendell Bambleby all that much. Not only was he barely sketched out as a character, in my opinion, but what was sketched out was shallow and flashy. I get that this seems to be the first book of a series, and maybe we’ll get to know him more in later books, but in this first one he might as well have been a flashy and well-dressed convenient plot point.

I hope this series grows to be much better than this first book has turned out to be. I think it shows promise, especially if author Heather Fawcett doesn’t make a single change to the fabulous Emily Wilde. Let Emily be Emily and the books will be all the better for it.

NetGalley, Ballantine, and Del Rey Books provided me with access to this title. All thoughts and opinions expressed are my own. Thank you. As per my personal policy this review will not appear on social media or any bookseller website due to the 3 star or lower rating.

File Under: Folklore/Mythology/Fantasy Romance/Books in a Fantasy Series/Historical Fantasy/Epistolary