I have seen the first book of the Emily Wilde series, Emily Wilde’s Encyclopedia of Fairies EVERYWHERE on the blogosphere and probably on bookstagram as well. And because I’ve always been interested in folklore and fairies, the book caught my eye. But also because I’m not generally a romance person, I’ve also procrastinated on reading the books. Well, I couldn’t procrastinate anymore because my bookclub chose the first book to read together and well… I fell in love with the books!

Emily Wilde’s Encyclopedia of Faries and Emily Wilde’s Map of the Otherlands both have Emily Wilde and her perhaps irritatingly cheerful (and perhaps not quite human) colleague and rival Wendell Bamebleby as they explore various parts of the world and unearth more secrets of the fae as in the pursuit of knowledge (and also a few personal agendas).

The part about Emily being a professor of dryadology is what appealed to me – learning more about the folklore of a world? That sounds very good and because of that, I thoroughly enjoyed Emily’s commitment to making her journal entries as scholarly as possible, with lots of footnotes and references to papers that I wish existed in real life. I think that Fawcett has done a good job with the worldbuilding here, I really enjoyed every single conversation about how the faerie realm(s) work and who lives in them.

What surprised me about this series was how much I enjoyed the romance here. I always say that I’m not a romance person (the last time I remember rooting for two character’s relationship was Kat and Daniel’s slow moving romance in the Below Stairs mysteries, other than that I’m sure there are others I liked but forgotten) but I suppose things have changed. Perhaps it’s because I’ve started re-reading shojo/romance-based manga as a way of practicing my Japanese, but I found that I really enjoyed the way Emily and Wendell tease one another. It’s a very adorable romance and I liked that it moved at Emily’s pace and that it did not overtake the main plot, rather it was an important subplot that helped with both the overall narrative and Emily’s character development.

As for the plot, I thought book one flowed very nicely into book two. They are two separate stories, it’s not a terrible cliffhanger, but I found myself wanting to follow Emily on more adventures after I finished her Encyclopedia of Faeries. I liked that the plot of Map of the Otherlands built on the events of the first book, which made reading it in sequence more rewarding.

That said, I did think that the first book was stronger. Emily manages to interact with more people (literally a whole village) in the first book and her friendships with the villages was a highlight of the book for me. While there is another village here and a surprising friendship with another professor, I found that the minor characters in the second book were not as well developed as in book one.

Overall, I enjoyed these two books! I read them one after another, which is why I am reviewing them both at the same time. If you’re a fan of fantasy and especially of folklore, you will probably be interested in reading these books!