Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries

Heather Fawcett
Fiction
Little Brown, 2023
315 pages
ISBN: 9780356519142
$19.00
Reviewed by Zoe Chong

 

Heather Fawcett dazzles readers in her first installment of the Emily Wilde series, a fantastical story following professor Wendell Bambleby and Emily, a researcher, on a mission to document elusive faerie populations around the world. Emily’s research is recounted in detailed journal entries that blend history and whimsy to great effect.

Emily travels to Ljosland, Norway from London in the fall of 1909, adapting to a rural environment as she gets closer to learning the secrets of the Hidden Ones. What are these elusive residents hiding? More importantly, why did her academic rival, the charmingly infuriating Wendell Bambleby, follow her here?

Emily realizes she can’t trust anything or anyone when “the laws of nature are too easily altered by those with magic enough to do so … Worlds may drift apart or dissolve or become the same place, like overlapping shadows.”

Things quickly heat up as Ljosland villagers begin to go missing, and the researchers realize the very creatures they are seeking might be behind the disappearances. Why are the faeries stealing humans and taking them into their world? Emily races to find the answer all the while going deeper into the Hidden Ones’ world. The king of the faeries is waiting for her, someone she increasingly suspects is already known to her….

            Fawcett makes it easy to indulge the lore of faeries with such a captivating and seasoned guide: “I have seen communities far more rustic than Hrafnsvik, for my career has taken me across Europe and Russia, to villages large and small and wilderness fair and foul.”

            Emily offers the reader enough information to follow along, but journal entries with long passages of dialogue seem less likely to be remembered with such accuracy. Even so, the dialogue is essential to understanding character motivations .

The characters are as charming as they are vivid, and Emily remains an entirely relatable, stubborn individual whose bluntness adds humour to the tale: “I suppose he felt something for me and had only hoped he would keep it to himself. Forever.”

            Emily’s voice is formal and analytical, but softens when Wendell cracks her hard exterior and the reader’s perception of her grows more nuanced. Emily’s descriptions cultivate intrigue as the mystery winds toward the final pages. Lovers of fairy tales and the otherworldly will love this venture into the realm of the Hidden Ones.

            Heather Fawcett is a best-selling Canadian author based in Victoria, BC. Her YA titles Even the Darkest Stars and All the Wandering Light, and her middle grade titles The School Between Winter and Fairyland, The Language of Ghosts, Ember and the Ice Dragons, The Grace of Wild Things, and The Islands have been translated into more than a dozen languages.

She has a BA in Archeology and a Master’s degree in English. The second installment of the Emily Wilde series is Map of the Otherlands, and the third, Emily Wilde’s Compendium of Lost Tales, was released in February of 2025.