8/25/24 12:19am
the winner of the liveblog poll by an absolute landslide was Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett!
A curmudgeonly professor journeys to a small town in the far north to study faerie folklore and discovers dark fae magic, friendship, and love in the start of a heartwarming and enchanting new fantasy series.
Cambridge professor Emily Wilde is good at many things: She is the foremost expert on the study of faeries. She is a genius scholar and a meticulous researcher who is writing the world's first encyclopaedia of faerie lore. But Emily Wilde is not good at people. She could never make small talk at a party--or even get invited to one. And she prefers the company of her books, her dog, and the Fair Folk.
So when she arrives in the hardscrabble village of Hrafnsvik, Emily has no intention of befriending the gruff townsfolk. Nor does she care to spend time with another new arrival: her dashing and insufferably handsome academic rival Wendell Bambleby, who manages to charm the townsfolk, get in the middle of Emily's research, and utterly confound and frustrate her.
But as Emily gets closer and closer to uncovering the secrets of the Hidden Ones--the most elusive of all faeries--lurking in the shadowy forest outside the town, she also finds herself on the trail of another mystery: Who is Wendell Bambleby, and what does he really want? To find the answer, she'll have to unlock the greatest mystery of all--her own heart.
tag is bats reads ewef
8/26/24 11:30am
ooo we got an epistolary 👀
8/26/24 12:14pm
hmm. perhaps not as epistolary as i thought. oh well. we still have footnotes 🎉
8/26/24 5:07pm
hit the chapter that takes place on my birthday 🎂
this book is so engrossing. i wish i had more to say but i'm just straight-up having a good time rn.
i think i need to read more books about peeps going out and doing researchy stuff. i remember vibing with a natural history of dragons, for all its quirks, and the book of speculation, even tho it's a different type of research and also just a huge downer of a book. i feel like the martian counts too, i think.
i was expecting to be more annoyed with bambleby, but he's surprisingly tolerable
8/26/24 6:23pm
yay gay people 🎉
8/26/24 6:26pm
he sits just like me fr
8/26/24 6:37pm
these two are actually cute together??? it's so weird reading a book where i'm actually invested in the romance. they're so hard to find. usually the most i can muster is a placid ambivalence.
this is refreshing, like a lovely summer swim in a cool lake
8/26/24 9:08pm
that's... certainly a choice. i think i follow her logic, but i'm skeptical that this won't be some trick or otherwise go horribly wrong. there's a looot of pages left.
8/26/24 9:13pm
ooo checkov's button-summoning spell!
8/26/24 10:02pm
i. hmm. i don't quite like how that was wrapped up? like there's so much talk about fae stuff being kind of bound by story and whatnot, so they couldn't handle it the way they had originally planned- but the way they did handle it didn't feel like it really fit with story either?
it feels almost as discordant as just killing him would have?
8/26/24 10:31pm
book done!
overall it was pretty good! i liked the format & the footnotes and the lore and whatnot. i liked the romance, shockingly.
i was too sucked in to post much lol
i think my only real complaint was the ending part. like i guess it works out but idk. something about it threw me off. maybe it was just a case of like, that amount of buildup could never have a satisfying payoff fore me? like maybe it's more a problem with me, that when it comes to mysteries there's just kind of a suspense cliff, i guess? where the more invested i am in a mystery the more deflated i am with how it plays out.
idk. still 4 stars, easy, and i'll def continue the series.
