For the past six book reviews I’ve shared, it’s been all about the Nine Kingdoms series. This week, I’m changing things up. I don’t know if I needed a break from the series or not, but when my husband took me to get out of the hospital room I had been stuck in for almost a week, caring for my parents, we ended up at Barnes & Noble.
If I’m honest, I hadn’t been to a Barnes & Noble in a while. You probably can tell by the photos I share of the books I’m reading, there’s usually, if not always, a library barcode sticker on the cover.
The first time I bought brand new books for myself was over my birthday this year at a local bookstore in Lawrence, KS, The Raven. I splurged and got two of my new favourites: Naomi Novik’s Uprooted and Spinning Silver. Before that, the only books I had bought for myself in years were either off Thriftbooks or from Half Price, and even those purchases were rare and not strictly books.
It’s not that I don’t like Barnes & Noble. I love it! But in years past, I’ve steered away from it for the sake of well…it’s expensive and I’m not made of money, but also to buy locally or used, to avoid further supporting the bloated consumeristic lifestyle we find ourselves trapped in against our will in a post-millennial age.
Not to say that Barnes & Noble is a corporate marketing scheme. I’m glad they’ve survived against Amazon for so long! For a time I might have thought that, but as I’ve furthered my pursuit of becoming a published author, I’ve learned more about the industry and how much bookstores like Barnes & Noble support it. And since a lot of my new friends are published, I want to support the industry as much as I can, even if the major publishing houses are the ones bloated with their arrogant schemes of how to squeeze every last penny out of the unassuming readers, tainting the art that is literature, but I digress.
Why I am saying all this? Why haven’t I started sharing an actual book review? Isn’t that why we’re here?
Yes, but to get to the point instead of waffling on, it was when my husband took me to Barnes & Noble for the first time in I don’t know how long I fell in love with it again. It was my oasis in the midst of a stressful desert full of hospital rooms and medical woes.
Whilst there, I perused the shelves looking for anything I might want to take home and add to my recently growing collection. Once again, I found myself looking at the cover of Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett.
Back when I visited The Raven Bookstore, I had caressed its satin matte cover for the first time, but instead chose the two Novik novels instead of the single book. Standing there again, I wanted to buy it, but I wasn’t certain. I had only purchased the Novik’s because I had read them before and knew how much I loved them. I didn’t know if I could make the leap and purchase a brand new book when I had never read it.
Instead, later that day, I placed a hold on it at my local library. I picked it up a few days later, and started reading it in the car even as my husband tried asking me a question of what we were doing later that day.
I wasn’t listening. I couldn’t.
Not when I was immediately swept away to a dark, cold corner of Scandinavia on a field work excursion with Emily Wilde, renowned female Cambridge professor of dryadology, on her mission to study the elusive “Hidden Ones” of the wintery North.
I stayed up far too many nights ruining my sleep schedule to read this novel. It is a masterpiece, a masterclass in genre blending. There’s romance, humor, historical settings, fantasy! It has it all.
Though it very much follows the lovers-to-enemies trope, it is freshly executed, especially when the protagonist, Emily, is so absorbed in her research, being a single-minded woman, she doesn’t realise there’s any romance to be had until her life is threatened and her colleague, Wendell Bambleby, saves her.
What I loved best about this book—besides everything—is Emily herself.
As a professor, a female one at that during a time when women are still regarded as little more than good breeding ground for a man’s progeny, she’s obviously stood out as an exception to the domestic rules. Though her presence at the university doesn’t seem to be too novel for this alternate version of the latter part of the nineteenth century, there are still those familiar misogynistic elements and presumptions about women.
Of course, to achieve all that she has, to be the woman she is, Emily is more brains than heart, but she finds it along the way, especially before the illustrious Fae she’s so determined to discover trick her out of it.
I don’t know why I enjoy brainiac characters so much. If it is because they are so starkly different to my emotional-driven self, or if I unconsciously see a multitude of similarities, I don’t know. However, I am still self-aware enough to know I’m both married to one such man and then my sister is another, which might be more the reason than anything.
This book is also written like Emily’s scientific journal, with footnotes and everything. Another detail I adore for the years I spent in research myself, and the continued conversations I have with my sister about her own.
I cannot recommend this book enough, so if you like anything and everything fae or want the fae version of Marie Brennan’s A Natural History of Dragons, then look no further and grab your copy of Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries today!
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Stars
