lightreads

Emily Wilde’s Encyclopedia of Faeries

3/5. Fantasy with strong romantic subplot about the socially-inept academic planning to winter in a remote northern village in order to make observations to finish her faerie encyclopedia. She gets entangled in faerie nonsense and village life, particularly after her annoyingly charming colleague, who might be fae himself, follows her.

Nice if you are into faeries (I am not) or, alternatively, the sort of romance where the woman is way too laser-focussed and practical to notice that the (deeply impractical and foppish) hero is absolutely crazy about her (I can definitely be persuaded). This book skims very lightly over a whole heck of a lot of things, like oh I don’t know the entire development of this alternate history world, or how our heroine’s career has been impacted by misogyny (the book really does not want to name that). So if you can stop yourself from thinking too hard about that, or how this book supposedly takes place in 1913ish but it could easily pass for 1993 for all the sense of time, then here you go. It’s a lot of faerie stuff and some nice village life stuff and some romance stuff, and never you mind about anything else. I leave it to each reader whether all of this is a virtue or a slight.

Content notes: One startling instance of self-mutillation for plot, not psychological reasons. Some faerie ensorcelment stuff.