By Staff Writer: Julia Simmons
Cozy fantasy is taking over adult entertainment. Booktok often recommends titles like Legends & Lattes, a series of novels featuring an orc who wants to run a bookshop. From videogames like Stardew Valley to TV adaptations like Moomin Valley, cozy fantasy is a genre that popped up like a weed and refuses to disappear.
Among all this popular cozy fantasy fiction, Heather Fawcett’s Emily Wilde series has taken the world by storm. Rated 3.99 on Goodreads, Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries is the first novel in a series centering on Professor Wilde’s lifelong obsession with all things fae.
This novel finds Wilde traveling to the village of Hrafnsvik on the island of Ljosland to investigate the secrets of the Hidden Ones- a particularly elusive breed of fae. Wilde is a scholar through and through, and vastly prefers her dog and her research over idle chitchat.
However, when Wilde finds her academic rival Wendall Brambleby has followed her to Hrafnsvik, she ends up right in the middle of the townsfolk’s secrets and woes. Whether to steal her work or get in her way, Brambleby stumbles and crashes into Wilde’s predictable research trip, shattering her expectations- and that of the reader’s.
The novel unwinds an interesting mystery, and although the plot is a bit predictable, Fawcett writes with an eloquence that makes the book hard to put down. Cozy and fantastic to the core, the Emily Wilde series is one that deserves its high Goodreads score.