![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Finally, a cozy fantasy with actual stakes!
Emily Wilde is a Cambridge professor of dryadology (the study of faeries) who travels to the remote village of Hrafansvik to finish her great work, an encyclopedia of faeries, with a study of a type of Scandinavian faeries. There are just a few problems: the locals are deeply suspicious of her, and she has absolutely terrible social skills; the local faeries are in the habit of kidnapping and mindwiping people; and another Cambridge professor, the charming/annoying Wendell Bambleby, descends upon her welcome solitude with a pair of grad students in tow.
The novel is in the form of Emily's journal, with plenty of footnotes and scholarly details on faeries. It is, very delightfully, exactly what one might hope for from the premise: an account of an academic's fieldwork on faeries, and a fantasy centrally dealing with human-faerie interactions. As a bonus, it also contains a very enjoyable romance between a pair of giant weirdos. Emily is extremely not good with people, and Bambleby, who initially appears to be the normal one, is also extremely, extremely not normal.
It's very funny, it has some nice plot twists, and I loved its portrayal of faeries. They're much more like old folklore faeries than like most modern twists on them, obeying their own strange and often incomprehensible logic which, in Emily's theory, is because they are story-based beings and will/must do whatever makes the best story. But also, they're just generally extremely weird and inhuman and hard for humans to understand.
My absolute favorite example of that is when Bambleby reverses time to behead an attacking elf... and then reverses time again to behead him again, because he enjoyed it so much. It's so hilariously sociopathic and weird - especially as behavior for a romantic hero! But then, Emily is also incredibly weird in her own way.
There are sequels which I haven't read yet, but this stands perfectly well on its own.