OVERALL RATING: 4/10
GENERAL FEELINGS TOWARDS MEDIA: ehhhh.
*WARNING! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS!*
Emily Wilde's Encylopedia of Fairies starts off strong, with an interesting setup (socially awkward researcher goes to Fantasy Iceland to discover new fairies that have never been academically researched before. I do have a few issues with this plot but I'll focus on the postives for now). Emily is blunt, weird and off-putting! She offends people by accident, and is quite an endearing character. The footnotes flesh out the world nicely, and it's fun to learn about the fairies of this fantasy 1900s Europe.
(One issue I have with the setting is that the island of the coast of Iceland seems to be a mishmash of Scandanavian cultures, and that every single local can speak english fluently...)
If only that's what the book mainly focused on.
The moment the book starts to shift tone from "whimiscal fantasy mystery" to "fantasy romance" is when it starts getting bad. I liked Wesley at the beginning, where he bosses students around and is a kinda pathetic guy. That's funny!! I like that! But then he starts getting described as handsome constantly. Honestly, this book is a great example of why romance plots should not always be included. The whole Emily/Wesley plot really bogged the book down and frankly was really uninteresting. The moment Wesley shifts from "weirdo dipshit" to "handsome sweetheart fae prince" is the moment when he gets boring, and I start thinking that Emily may be a self-insert.
Another nitpick I have with this book is that it really wants to be a wholesome inclusive fantasy story...set in the 1910s. There's a lesbian couple, who are treated as just run-of-the-mill by an English researcher in the 1910s. Heather Fawcett, did you do your research on how homosexuality was treated in England in the 1900s-10s? I understand that this is Whimiscal Fantasy Land, but frankly the worldbuilding is not fleshed out enough for me to believe that Fawcett's England is the charming accepting place that she wants me to believe that it is. In addition, misogyny in the academic world is alluded to, but chalked up to Emily being off-putting and rude, which is seen as an Unforgivable Fault apparently?
The whole plotline of "kind Englishwoman saves the ignorant locals" is not a favorite of mine, and the final scenes are just uninteresting. She has to be saved from this random fairy king who shows up 0.2 seconds in???? Huh???? The fairy castle's descriptions are fun to read, I'll give it that.
In conclusion, a lot of love definitely went into this book, but it was really not for me. It's a shame, because if was written/structured better and if a little more thought had been put into the worldbuilding, it would've been a good book. :(