I wasn't expecting Wendell Bambleby to be voiced by a guy in this chapter.
What is the book about?
Do you believe in Faeries? Well in Emily Wilde’s Encyclopedia of Faeries they are real. I listened to that book this week. It is a book about Emily Wilde, a professor of Dryadology at the University of Cambridge, who goes to Hrafnsvik Ljosland to study faeries for the last entry of her Encyclopedia. Hrafnsvik Ljosland is a fictional town on a island near Norway. She rents a cabin from a farmer for a few months while she studies the Hidden Ones (the name of the faeries.) She is a very smart and brave scholar but she accidentally offends the whole town and she has to figure out how to win their hearts back, escape a proposal from a king and finish her Encyclopedia before time runs out. She is joined by Wendell Bambleby, another professor at Cambridge University, but will he be helpful or a distraction? Will Emily successfully get back on the right path?
If you want to skip spoilers scroll to the end to see my final score.
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Fan art of Emily and her dog by Flourishing Fables on Instagram.
What are my favorite things?
One of my favorite things about the book is that it is written as if we are reading Emily’s journal. Early on in the book she says that she is writing in the journal just in case she gets killed and if someone wants to continue her studies where she left off. That might be a bit morbid but I think that it makes Emily seem more real. Towards the end of the book Emily is asleep because she used magic to help Wendell create an ice sword so that they can escape. On the ride home Wendell writes in the journal telling the story of how they escaped, the narrating goes from Ell Potter to Michael Dodds, and the writing style or Point Of View (POV) change is written very well. It makes it convincing that someone else did write it, thus making it more real.
I liked all of the detail in the book. There are great descriptions of the village that we are in both when Emily is in the normal human realm or in the faerie realm. In the book there are also foot notes as if it is an actual book or encyclopedia that helps us imagine the food, homes, people and magic/ other faerie enchantments. One of my favorite descriptions is of Poe (one of the Hidden Ones that Emily calls a Brownie.) Poe is “very small, its frame skeletal with a face full of teeth and two sharp black stones for eyes tucked beneath a raven skin that it seemed to wear as a sort of cloak, but the skin had been poorly cleaned and the eyes were absent. It had all the substance of cobwebs and was both there and not there; viewed from certain angles, it was merely the shadow of a stone, and from others, a live raven.” Poe also has “fingernails the length again of its spindly arms and sharp enough to slit [a] throat without [one] noticing the injury immediately.” What is your Favorite description in a book?
Fan art of Poe found on Fandom
What are my dislikes?
The only thing that I didn’t like was how Wendell went from sleeping with random women to asking Emily to marry him. They are just colleagues/friends and he just skips the whole romantic relationship thing all together. Also he is kind of avoiding Emily at first. He really starts to come to life when he has to save Emily the first time.
My final thoughts?
I really liked this book. It has been my favorite read of the year so far. Like I said I loved how it was written as if it were a journal or diary, it just makes the book seem more fun almost if Emily was our friend. It is a cozy fantasy/adventure book. It is the first book in a trilology. I think it is perfet for someone who is 13 years old or older.
My Score: