Fantasy & Magical Realism
Emily Wilde is a formidable scholar and a hopeless people-person: brusque, precise and far more comfortable cataloguing faeries than talking to humans.
Heather Fawcett's charming series opener takes the form of Emily's field journal as she decamps to a frozen northern village to complete the first comprehensive encyclopaedia of faerie species - only to have her infuriatingly charismatic academic rival, Wendell Bambleby, turn up and complicate everything.
Cozy but not toothless, the novel blends genuine folklore and real faerie menace with a slow-burn enemies-to-lovers romance and the dry comedy of a prickly narrator thawing despite herself. Fawcett clearly loves the old dark fairy tales, and the danger beneath the whimsy gives the warmth its weight. It reads like a fireside blend of Diana Wynne Jones and Naomi Novik, ideal for a winter evening.
For readers who want intelligent, atmospheric comfort fantasy with romance and a memorable heroine, it is delightful - and the start of a much-loved series.
The book
Emily Wilde, a brilliant, socially awkward Cambridge scholar of folklore, travels to a remote northern village to research its faeries for her encyclopaedia, joined, to her irritation, by her charming, mysterious academic rival.
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