(courtesy Hachette Australia)
Reading Heather Fawcett’s lustrously beautifully, funny and charming series centred on dryadologist (someone who studies fairies) Emily Wilde is to be transported to a rich world which is lightly escapist and darkly foreboding all at once.
Her previous novels in the series, Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries (2023) and Emily Wilde’s Map of the Otherlands (2024) were masterful and highly compelling journeys into realms far beyond our own, though they sit cheek by jowl with the mortal world, where fairies and a host of strange creatures live lives that look similar though also nothing like our own.
Into these worlds, ventures intrepid academic Emily Wilde, a woman who prefers academic studies to almost anything else and who regards her colleague, Wendell Bambledy as an annoyingly idiosyncratic oddity who fabricates his studies and who seems to be more of a dilettante than a committed seeker of scientific truth.
———- SPOILER ALERT !!!!! ———- If you have read the previous two instalments in the series, you will well acquainted with the fact that Wendell is in in fact the crown prince of a fairie realm in Ireland, forced to flee to live and work with humans after his evil stepmother, Arna, murderously disposes of his entire family and seizes the throne as her own.
Wendell is understandably shaken by these events but rather than letting it consume him, he leans into the party boy proclivities of his youth and treats life as a treat, a joke, an indulgent bon mot.
‘Welcome back, Professor Wilde,’ he [Lord Taran] murmured. ‘Or should I say Walters? You certainly know how to make an entrance.’
Somehow the ever-serious Emily and the flirtatiously lighthearted Wendell realise they have fallen for each other, and as Emily Wilde’s Compendium of Lost Tales opens, they are readying them to journey into Wendell’s stolen kingdom and retake the throne, turning Emily from an academic observer into someone at the very heart of the action.
She’s not entirely sure she is ready for this, and that a mortal has any right to be in magical fairie kingdom, much less as its queen, but she loves Wendell and he loves her, and together with her trusty dog Shadow, they enter the lost land of Wendell’s youth where they are almost immediately thrust into its deadly intrigues and murky machinations.
While the ———- SPOILER ALERT !!!!! ———- retaking of the throne is relatively, and perhaps suspiciously, straightforward, what comes next is not with Emily with fairies who are so contorted by immortality that they have lost all sense of ordinary right and wrong, demonstrated most potently by Arna who, as a parting “gift” has set a poisonous curse upon a land.
So vile and powerful is this curse that the only thing that can best it requires a massive amount of sacrifice by them both and much of Emily Wilde’s Compendium of Lost Tales is devoted to Wendell and Emily working hard, he with his magic and her with her vast storehouse of Folk knowledge, to save the land and indeed their new and thrillingly frightening lives.
This is fantasy with a dazzlingly huge and compelling “F” and it mixes the darkness of corrupted souls and twisted politicking with the vibrancy of love and found family and how while the former sees itself as stronger in every way, it maybe the latter that, with nimble footwork and tenacious hearts, may yet save the day in glorious triumph.
But as Emily Wilde’s Compendium of Lost Tales progresses, you are given cause to wonder, especially at hugely impactful juncture if love and justice can truly conquer all, and whether the immense love Emily and Wendell have for each other can defeat darkness so black that it might shroud the light forever.
Bringing together grand and epic journeys with the intimacy of love and friendship and found family, Emily Wilde’s Compendium of Lost Tales is a wildly enthralling tale of good versus evil and how things that appear to be one or the other may not what they first seem.
What drives Emily Wilde’s Compendium of Lost Tales is the potency and power of stories which in faerie kingdoms can actually and manifestly affect how events progress and what happens to the souls and thoughts and actions of people.
If you have ever felt there is real power in the stories you read and tell then here in Emily Wilde’s Compendium of Lost Tales is proof positive that everything you have felt and believed is true and that dismissing stories as inconsequential confections of the mind is a dangerous and potentially fatal line of belief.
Then, before I could move or speak, he stepped forward and opened a door– I thought I saw a flash of it, just for a moment, a thing of gossamer and darkness in the left side of Wendell’s shadow. And he was gone.
Beyond it’s obvious love of storytelling, Emily Wilde’s Compendium of Lost Tales continues the series’ audaciously imaginative world-building and its academically inclined ability to make the fairie realm feels as real as our own.
Far from being magically winsome figures who dance about in clouds of light and glitter, giving out good vibes all round, fairies, at least those in the aristocratic upper echelons are quite capricious and as prone to flawed and fallible behaviour as we are, and perhaps more so if that’s possible and it’s the way Fawcett makes fairies realms feel magical and blighted at all once that makes the books so transportively beguiling.
The creation and sustaining of these fantasy realms aside, what beats at the heart of Emily Wilde’s Compendium of Lost Tales, and indeed the whole wonderfully readable series, is the power that comes from the marriage of the mortal and the immortal, of the leavening that Wendell experiences as his worst faerie tendencies are ameliorated by Emily’s humanity, and how Emily, in turn, becomes something far more than she was as she encounters a world that tries to eat her alive, almost literally at times, and rises to the considerable challenges she faces.
Emily Wilde’s Compendium of Lost Tales is full of whimsy and humour, friendship and love, darkness and despair but most of all, a deliciously delightful sense of how much magic lies out there and that when its united with our humanity it becomes something no one and nothing can defeat, changes everyone and everything in ways that ensures nothing will be the same ever again.