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Heather Fawcett's Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries occupies a peculiar and rather charming space in modern fantasy - part academic fieldwork journal, part cozy romance, part folkloric mystery, and not quite what you might expect from any of those descriptions.

Set in 1909, the novel follows Emily Wilde, a Cambridge professor of dryadology - the study of faeries - as she travels to the remote Scandinavian village of Hrafnsvik to complete the final chapter of her life's work. Emily is brilliant, meticulous, and almost entirely hopeless with people. She would rather catalogue brownie habitats than make small talk, and her arrival in Hrafnsvik goes about as well as you'd expect for someone with the social instincts of a particularly bookish hedgehog. Things get more complicated when her academic rival, Wendell Bambleby - dashing, infuriating, and suspiciously knowledgeable about the Folk - shows up uninvited at her cottage door.

The journal entry format is one of the book's most distinctive choices and will likely determine how far individual readers get. Fawcett commits fully to the conceit, complete with scholarly footnotes and Emily's stiff resistance to recording anything personal in her research notes. It gives the narrative a clandestine, voyeuristic quality - these are field notes not meant for an audience - and it captures Emily's guarded personality beautifully. But the academic dryness is genuine, not merely decorative, and the first half of the book moves at the pace of actual field research. Patience is required.

Where Fawcett really distinguishes herself is in the faerie lore and the romance. The worldbuilding is layered and textured, treating faeries with an almost anthropological seriousness while never losing their capacity to terrify. These are not the prettified fae of court romance but creatures bound by strange laws, capable of casual cruelty and eerie beauty in equal measure. Beneath the cozy surface - the fireside scenes, the baking, the village life - there runs a genuine current of danger that keeps the story from becoming too comfortable. And the central romance cleverly subverts the genre's worst tendencies. There are no captive mortal maidens or coercive glamours here. Emily and Wendell are intellectual equals whose banter and slowly building trust feel earned rather than engineered. It is a slow burn in every sense, but a satisfying one.

The book's weaknesses cluster around its structure. The ending feels slightly rushed compared to the leisurely middle, and some plot threads - particularly around Wendell's true nature - are left deliberately open for the sequel rather than resolved. Emily's prose style, while perfectly in character, can tip from charming into genuinely laborious during the slower stretches.

Still, Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries is a genuinely original take on faerie fiction - warm but never saccharine, scholarly but never sterile, and anchored by a protagonist whose prickly exterior makes her eventual vulnerability all the more affecting.