Emily Wilde's Compendium of Lost Tales

Emily Wilde's Compendium of Lost Tales

By Heather Fawcett 

Emily Wilde has spent her life studying faeries. A renowned dryadologist, she has documented hundreds of species of Folk in her Encyclopaedia of Faeries. Now she is about to embark on her most dangerous academic project studying the inner workings of a faerie realm-as its queen.

Along with her former academic rival-now fiancé-the dashing and mercurial Wendell Bambleby, Emily is immediately thrust into the deadly intrigues of Faerie as the two of them seize the throne of Wendell's long-lost kingdom, which Emily finds a beautiful nightmare, filled with scholarly treasures.

Emily has been obsessed with faerie stories her entire life, but at first she feels as ill-suited to Faerie as she did to the mortal world-how could an unassuming scholar like herself pass for a queen? Yet there is little time to settle in-Wendell's murderous stepmother has placed a deadly curse upon the land before vanishing without a trace. It will take all of Wendell's magic-and Emily's knowledge of stories-to unravel the mystery before they lose everything they hold dear.

Another small disappointment. The book is enjoyable and a reasonably satisfying conclusion (I assume) to the series, but the entire plot hinges on Emily reading a bunch of fairy tales and then doing the things in the stories, to the same effect. It's kind of boring. There's very little in the way of surprise, and Emily displays basically no ingenuity, which is one of the most entertaining parts of the previous books - her plans and plots.  Although the book is as long as the earlier ones, it seems like very little happens: she and Wendell journey to his realm and get settled in, they discover the old queen has poisoned everything, they investigate and stop her (mostly by dull research and using again, the exact templates we see Emily read about several times when comparing various stories) and then Emily has to ask someone else to save Wendell (this involves more library time for her and the actual rescue is done by someone else off screen pretty quickly) and then Emily decides to save the queen - this is pretty much Emily's only action piece and it's arguably far too little, too late.

 We spend some time with Wendell and Emily, there's a few entertaining pieces, mostly concerning Wendell's uncle, when Wendell has to win a battle against him, and when Wendell's cat, Orga demonstrates her irritation with him. But Taran never really manages to fulfill early hints at menace or duplicity, so it's another piece of tension gone. The book flirts with the idea that Wendell becoming a faerie king could change him for the worse and make him tyrannical as well, but then kinda just backs off of it completely. Emily rescuing Wendall from his own transformation might have been an interesting point of tension, but again, it peters out to a big old nothing-burger.

Look, there's absolutely nothing wrong with a cozy story with characters one presumes you like, but it doesn't live up to the earlier books in the series and if it had been the first in the series I would not have gone further. 

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