Emily Wilde books by Heather Fawcett (Encyclopaedia of Faeries and Map of the Otherlands) review

A reflection on the core of the Fantasy genre

*Image taken from the Goodreads.com website. No copyright infringement intended.

January 28, 2025

Categorization: Fantasy

Where read: Kindle

Some spoilers ahead. 

The Emily Wilde books by Heather Fawcett are what I picked up after I put down Wind and Truth, in preparation for the 3rd book in the series coming out on February 6, 2025.

I am not usually one for romance-type fantasy (although nothing against that, it’s just not my thing. I think that as a gamer and a nerd, I need the adventure and lore hits more than the swoony thing).

And I am going to say anyway, if you are looking for romance, this is not the book for you. The romance I think is one of the weaker elements of the book, actually.

But this is a great book!

I have always thought that the core of the Fantasy genre is that the world has to be somewhere you want to be in. And I mean BE, not visit, not see. A Fantasy book will succeed if you want to be one of the characters having all the adventures and meeting the people in the book, and naturally, also want to do all the mundane things the book describes. A masterful description of mundane things in a book is one of the things that will really hook you into the book’s universe – for isn’t life made up primarily of mundane things, interspersed between adventures few and far in between? I have always thought that’s why I loved descriptions of food, markets, taverns, and preparations for a journey (in said tavern, what is hardtack anyway?), in Fantasy books. But I digress, that is a subject for another day.

Where was I. Oh yes, wanting to BE in the world (not visit, not see) - that is different, and is a different feeling, from say, wanting to see a dragon described in a book, or have a vague curiosity about a tradition or custom described in a book. It is why the Hunger Games movie fails for me (why on earth would I want to be in that unfun world) and why I wish I could scrub RF Kuang’s book about the Rape of Nanjing from my brain (talk about negative life experience) .

Well, in the Emily Wilde books, Heather Fawcett has succeeded in creating a world I want to BE in! I want to go to the snowy regions of that Norwegian village she described in her first book and eat brown bread and chop wood and look for small fairies. She is a beautiful writer by the way, in that her use of language does what it is intended, which is to bring you back to the Regency on the heels of Jane Austen and Thackeray, and Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell (a masterpiece). Come to think of it, her books could have been set in the Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell universe. Huh, I just realized that.

Anyway, and while her world-building in relation to the fey and their down-the-rabbit-hole hijinks is all that can be hoped for, I think readers will find her true brilliance in the delightful mundanities that pepper her book. My favorite part of the first book, for example, was when Emily met her little brownie whom she named “Poe” for the poor raven-skin he was wearing. I read it and I thought, I want a brownie! I want a brownie to take care of and to love me and give me its loyalty and make me bread and give me a key to his door and speak in riddles with, for of course he is still a fairy creature and one must be wary. The descriptions of Poe and his developing behavior (as there truly was something academic about how Emily studied and described him - wonderful) were more fascinating to me than the unpeeling of the pretty onion that was Emily’s love-interest Wendell something.

Was it perfect? I mean, I thought the point that Emily is a huge geek with pencils in her hair and Wendell is, in contrast, the Faerie Brad Pitt was belabored (but maybe romance-genre related? I don’t know, I haven’t read enough romance to be able to make a discerning comparison). I also felt like some of the grand adventure scenes were rushed (more in the 2nd book). But, I would be nitpicking because in the end, do I care? Not really no! Because I want to be in Jane Austen’s world looking for fairies and being brilliant at solving nonsensical fairy clues and make magic and study magic (yes yes, my Hogwarts letter never came), I want to be in Austria in the mountains and see the fairy museum in Cambridge and watch Wendell sew my clothes. I love the world she created and the sense of discovery she imbues with every word and every mundane description of a cabin and what nice meal the villagers brought for supper.

I am a fan (I stan? I am not sure I used that correctly) of Emily Wilde. Keep on Heather Fawcett, keep on.