(courtesy Hachette Australia)
Humanity, for all its curiosity and insightfulness, is not that good, by and large, at seeing anything that doesn’t sit well within its established physical frames of reference.
Thus, while we happily explore the implications of a multiverse, which has its roots in actual physics, we tend to treat the idea of other worlds hidden from own such as faerie realms, with a high degree of skepticism, if not outright scornful disbelief.
But back in the first decade or so in the twentieth century, the belief in worlds beyond our own is not only know about but readily accepted, both by people in the rural areas of Europe where faeries either help or hinder (or far, bloodily worse) and by academics such as Emily Wilde, now a professor at Cambridge University in the field of dryadology, whom we first met in the titular Emily Wilde’s Encylopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett.
In the second book of the series, Emily Wilde’s Book of the Otherworlds – a third book, Emily Wilde’s Compendium of Lost Tales, is scheduled for release in 2025 – Fawcett sends her intrepid and intellectually curious eponymous protagonist off to Austria in search of a nexus, or multi-realm door, which may gain her and her academic colleague and would-be husband, Wendell Bambleby – he has proposed but Emily, in her peculiarly, socially awkward way has not yet accepted – into a particular faerie kingdom in Ireland.
Wendell’s eyes were dark. he took a half step towards me. ‘Emily–‘
‘No,’ I said inanely, without knowing exactly what I meant. I felt flustered and as surprised as he was. Also, a little ashamed of myself–hadn’t I just resolved that it was unfair of me to give him false hope, that the only wise course would be to answer his proposal in the negative?
I seized one of his suitcases and added, ‘We must make our train,’ hurrying away as fast as my legs would carry me.
Given Emily’s wide-ranging curiosity about faeries in general, why does this one kingdom matter so much?
Well ———- SPOILER ALERT !!!!! ———- Wendell is an exiled faerie prince, sent from his vicious homeland – for the fae, whatever your Disneyfied perception of them are actually quite nasty, at least those of the upper crust variety; common fae are often, though not always, far friendlier – and he wants to go home, his time spent pretending to be human and a skilled academic (he isn’t actually, possessing more charm than academic rigour) at an end.
He needs to depose his stepmother, who has usurped his crown and who is waging a successful expansionary war to take over neighbouring kingdoms.
Emily, though she fears the fae as much as she fascinated them, means to help him, and so she, Wendell, her niece and boss from Cambridge set off to the Austrian Alps to track down the fabled nexus, first discovered by two academics who have long disappeared and who may well be lost in the very faerie realms that Emily and Wendell are seeking to enter.
Their arrival in the alps, which follows some faerie intrusions in Cambridge itself, which suggests the stepmother is out to eliminate her arrival, making the discovery of the faerie door that much more pressing, sets of a thrillingly engaging sequence of events which are simultaneously magical and mystical but also grounded in some very ordinary humanity, which includes Emily deciding if her love for Wendell is sufficient to send into the realms of faerie, perchance much, if not all, of the rest of her life there.
A great deal of what made the first book in the series a funny, thrilling and heartwarming joy is present in Emily Wilde’s Book of the Otherworlds which sports the same buoyant prickliness and sense of risky adventure that makes these trips into all-too-real mythology such a pleasure to read.
Emily, who is not good at doing people, and Wendell, who is reckless charm personified (or is that faeriefied?) continue to bicker and bounce off each other, with particular, focused and obsessed Emily often infuriated by Wendell’s garrulously laissez faire attitude to just about everything.
It’s entertaining to read these two go at it with each other, not only because it’s richly and hilariously written by Fawcett, but because deep down you know they not only like but love each other, with Emily Wilde’s Book of the Otherworlds acting, like its predecessor as a gorgeously twisted rom-com of absolute opposites somehow finding common romantic ground.
Like any well-written rom-com, we need the characters to be richly and fully formed and they are, and though the worlds they navigate and the various faerie beings they meet can be riskily bloodthirsty or contrarily, charmingly odd, and their challenges darkly threatening, what sits at the centre of the story, abounding in imaginative world-building of the most captivating kind, is a couple of divergent people who should not work as a twosome, finding themselves drawn together again and again.
And thus I sit here by the fire, scratching away in this journal as if making some sense of our plight might in any way relieve it. Every creak and groan of the cottage sends my heart racing for fear of unfriendly visitors, either of the faerie or mortal variety. For how long will we be permitted to shelter here, after what we have done? What I have done. I have done this.
Alive with an effervescent sense of intellectual curiosity and a love of a magical world that exists just beyond our mortal understanding, Emily Wilde’s Book of the Otherworlds is a true delight, a novel which resonates with the thrill of the mysterious Other, wrapped in magic and creatures and cultures that are the stuff of fairytales sprung into real life, but which understands all too well, that even in the face of the extraordinary, that people can’t help being fallible people.
Written in language that perfectly evokes the formalness of a bygone era of society and academic investigation, and alive with the vivacity of dangerous thrills and beings both likeable and decidedly not, Emily Wilde’s Book of the Otherworlds is a masterclass in how to tell a fantastical tale while still keeping an eye firmly on the vagaries of the people at the heart of it (some of whom, to complicate things, aren’t actually people at all).
So propulsive and yet emotionally grounded is this wondrously good novel that you find yourself racing through it, much as Emily is forced to move when she has faeries nipping at her heels (quite literally at times), eager to see where these extraordinary events will take you next.
Richly and vivaciously alive with imaginative world-building and evocatively magical storytelling, Emily Wilde’s Book of the Otherworlds is one of those books that sweeps you away on an adventure full of thrills and spills and uncertain outcomes, while exploring what it is to be human, to be at once in love and yet unsure of what to do next, and how opposites often do attract and must decide how they will handle the many and varied challenges of a world far more exciting and dangerous than many of us realise.