Emily Wilde’s Map of the Otherlands By Heather Fawcett

Emily Wilde’s Encyclopedia of Faeries is an enchanting and captivating story that is sure to please any bookworm who loves a fantasy romance.

Favourite Quote:

“A pencil!” he shouted at me as he leapt over a desk– the sheerie who had lunged at him collided with it and rolled towards Rosem who let out another shriek, “Toss me one of your pencils!”

“Have you gone mad?” I cried even as I removed the pencil from my cloak pocket and threw it at his head.

It began to transform before it even reached him, elongating and flashing through the shadows–a sword. I regretted aiming for his head then, but Wendell caught it with the grace of a trained swordsman, which of course he was.

Book Synopsis: 

When mysterious faeries from other realms appear at her university, curmudgeonly professor Emily Wilde must uncover their secrets before it’s too late, in this heartwarming, enchanting second installment of the Emily Wilde series.
Emily Wilde is a genius scholar of faerie folklore who just wrote the world’s first comprehensive encyclopaedia of faeries. She’s learned many of the secrets of the Hidden Ones on her adventures . . . and also from her fellow scholar and former rival Wendell Bambleby.
Because Bambleby is more than infuriatingly charming. He’s an exiled faerie king on the run from his murderous mother and in search of a door back to his realm. And despite Emily’s feelings for Bambleby, she’s not ready to accept his proposal of marriage: Loving one of the Fair Folk comes with secrets and dangers.
She also has a new project to focus on: a map of the realms of faerie. While she is preparing her research, Bambleby lands her in trouble yet again, when assassins sent by his mother invade Cambridge. Now Bambleby and Emily are on another adventure, this time to the picturesque Austrian Alps, where Emily believes they may find the door to Bambleby’s realm and the key to freeing him from his family’s dark plans.
But with new relationships for the prickly Emily to navigate and dangerous Folk lurking in every forest and hollow, Emily must unravel the mysterious workings of faerie doors and of her own heart.

Review: 

I devoured the first book in this series and rushed to the store so I could jump right into this one. Once again, I found myself falling in love with Heather’s storytelling and her characters. I am happy to say that this book does not suffer from the dreaded second-book syndrome. It was just as captivating and unique as the first book. This story picks up roughly a few months to a half a year later from the ending of the first book. FYI, if you haven’t read the first book, I would highly recommend not reading this review, as there are spoilers from the previous book. 

Emily and Bambleby are on the hunt to find a fairy door that will help Bambleby return to his kingdom and square off with his stepmother for control over the throne. We find ourselves at the University of Cambridge, where Emily believes she has found a lead to finding a door. But things take a turn when Bambleby is attacked by his stepmother’s assassins and is poisoned at some point. These events inject that sense of urgency into the quest and plot, which I liked. It heightens the emotions and has the characters racing against the clock. Emily and Bambleby, along with a few new secondary characters, travel to the Austrian Alps, where they spend the rest of the book exploring the remote community. Once again, the setting effectively creates a mysterious, enchanted atmosphere that transports you into the story. I love it when the characters are essentially cut off from the rest of the world and find themselves in a new place that is seeping with these dangerous and wondrous vibes, and in this case, also has unknown and dangerous magical creatures living in it. I found myself devouring everything about this setting; it becomes another main character that is so vital to the story. 

This is a slower-paced fantasy. There are moments where there are blips of action, and the ending does pick up in pacing, but overall, you aren’t going to be sitting at the edge of your seat with your heart pounding with excitement. That’s just not what this book and series are meant to be. Yes, there is this sense of racing against the clock, but that doesn’t translate into frantic moments in the plot. I would say this is a cozy fantasy. You get to enjoy what you are reading at a more leisurely pace, which I loved. Once again, the story is told via Emily’s journal entries, with the exception of one entry, which Bambleby writes. I love the structure of this book. It’s grown on me. In this book, we get to explore other unknown areas in this magical world that exists within this series. This time, we are looking at this series of doors that connect our human world with various fairy kingdoms. That sense of unknown is intensified with these doors because you don’t know what is on the other side, and it is incredibly easy to get lost in this nexus that exists between all these realms. 

There is a romantic element to the story. Like with the first book, this series is great for those bookworms looking for a closed-door romance, where the romance isn’t necessarily front and center throughout the entire plot. At the end of the previous book, Bambleby had asked Emily to marry him, and in this book, we see Emily struggling to determine her answer. It’s clear that she loves Bambleby, but marrying him is no simple matter. He is the heir to the throne of a fairy kingdom that is known to be extraordinarily dangerous. There is also the danger of being a mortal ruling a fairy kingdom. Emily is as pragmatic as ever, and it’s not until she realizes that it’s her heart she needs to be listening to, not her brain, that she makes her decision. 

Emily Wilde’s Map of the Otherlands is an enchanting and magical story that is sure to captivate its readers from beginning to end.