(no subject)

[skygiants]

genarti got Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries out of the library recently after seeing a couple of positive reviews around DW, so I snagged it and read it before it went back -- and I am glad of the reviews, because otherwise I would have immediately assumed from the title that I was likely to be completely allergic to it. In fact it was much less agonizingly twee than suggested by the title and I was not allergic to it; it was a fun time!

This is one of those books that is written as An Academic's Field Notes, which depending on how plausibly the voice lands can either be enjoyable or excruciating. This one did not grate on me, although I did spend most of the book assuming we were in the 1890s until Emily Wilde mentioned something casually in passing about 'black-and-white like a film' and I was like WHAT? and immediately looked up and demanded of genarti when she thought the book was set. (genarti said '1910s? we must be pre WWI because nobody ever mentions it?' but given givens I have got to assume that this is simply a World With Fairies And Without WWI.) Honestly I think I think the reason I assumed it was set earlier is because it feels like it wants to be the romantasy Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell -- it's got the eerie/incomprehensible fae encounters and the various bits of folklore that genuinely feel like they run on a kind of non-human logic, as well as the fun academic footnotes dropping intriguing hints about other interesting stories along this world's timeline. Obviously it is not much like JSMN, at heart this is still extremely a relatively light romantasy, but aiming in that direction makes it stronger and more substantive and convincing I think than it might otherwise be.

The other thing it feels a bit like it wants to be is Howl's Moving Castle -- the love interest to our awkwardly brisk professor is her annoyingly flamboyant colleague, darling of the department, who never travels anywhere without an entourage of supportive graduate students. One certainly enjoys annoying 4 annoying although I think if you want to write Howl Pendragon 'glamorous magical mystery man who turns out to just be an irritating Ph.D' is more fun than 'irritating Ph.D. who turns out to be a glamorous magical creature' and I do also think that if we are going in that direction the book would be a bit stronger if he was a bit more fundamentally alien/scary ... we get one or two moments but he still remains, fundamentally, an irritating Ph.D., which is good for the romance but makes the whole fairy realm seem a bit less fundamentally alien and scary by proxy. A difficult balance to strike.

Anyway. Otherwise, Fawcett, as I've mentioned, is very good at coming up with faerie lore if perhaps slightly less good at grounding the human bits of the worldbuilding. Enjoyable read! I think I forgot to mention what the leads are actually doing for most of the book, which is 'being bad at over-wintering in a small Scandinavian town whose inhabitants are constantly judging them for not knowing how to chop wood.'

Comments

[ghost_lingering]

I feel so vindicated that you also noticed how much it wanted to be Howl's Moving Castle & also how Howl's Moving Castle does a better Howl.

I honestly think a huge part of my enjoyment of the book is how much I love a good blizzard & how I'm low key disappointed that I haven't really experienced a good once since I was a kid.

You know, reading this...I think I just forgot about halfway through the book that it was supposed to be set sometime in the past & I just started assuming that this version of the world was just Like That. Huh.

[skygiants]

yes, the stuck-in-a-blizzard element and the just general practicalities of Living in Extreme Snow were definitely some of my favorite parts!

I kept drifting into Nineteenth Century mode until something jolted me out of it, but I think that's largely because the last book I read that most approached this, other than JSMN, was the first of the Lady Trent series (which I didn't get on with.)

[genarti]

I totally agree that I would have bounced off the title as likely to be excessively twee and/or slight (and would have thought it was a rather different book than it is) except for seeing the positive reviews go around DW, so thank you to the reviewers! Even so I double-checked the name on the library request a couple of times, like, "It was definitely this one, right...?"

I said this to you in person but I'm saying it again here, which is that I think it would have been a more interesting book with more space for its character motivations to breathe if it hadn't been a romance, or at least not a one-book romance. If they had simply been bickering colleagues who respected each other as friends, either full stop or with an ambiguous option on a romance that paid off round about book 3, I would've felt much less certain about where the book was going and more immersed in it thereby.

It was never going to be that; the romance hints are being dropped from fairly early on. (And also, romantasy is so wildly popular right now that I'm not sure it would've been published if it hadn't had a core romance, or would have made enough of a splash to cross my path in the first place, so there's that.) Anyway, it did generally sell me on the romance despite some tropes I'm often a hard sell on, so well done Heather Fawcett and I'm not really complaining much; I just let out a wistful sigh every so often, thinking about the next universe over version of the book that would have been even more up my particular alley.

I see where you're getting Howl, but I didn't get that so much. I was glad he wasn't purely an irritating Ph.D. with zero magical creature, because that would've very easily tripped into Obnoxious Smug Genius Man Who Makes Others Do His Work (the annoying kind, rather than the endearingly annoying kind) to me, but I agree that a little more fundamental alienness would have been nice. We get some! I suspect through anyone else's eyes we would have gotten more! I still would've liked a bit more, and would've liked the villagers' reactions to be more strongly brought out, but it was already more than I expected to get and more than many books in the fairy romantasy genre do, so I wasn't all that bothered.

A bit slighter than it had to be but much less slight than it could easily have gotten away with being; I had a good time!

[kore]

"it would have been a more interesting book with more space for its character motivations to breathe if it hadn't been a romance, or at least not a one-book romance"

I think you have really put your finger on it. It wasn't that the romance was bad, or unbelievable; it just seemed to suck up a lot of the book's oxygen.

[genarti]

Yeah. And it would, I think, have been really interesting and compelling as a romance arc that played out quietly over multiple books! But that's not publishing's style these days -- maybe for secondary characters, but not for the leads -- and, to be fair, I have no idea if it's a style Heather Fawcett is interested in, either. But personally I think the book would have been stronger for it.

[skygiants]

Yeah, as you know, I definitely had the wistful pause about a third of the way through like 'this is obviously going to be a romance but I feel like it would be very charming if it wasn't ....'

[lokifan]

I think if you want to write Howl Pendragon 'glamorous magical mystery man who turns out to just be an irritating Ph.D' is more fun than 'irritating Ph.D. who turns out to be a glamorous magical creature'

ABSOLUTELY.

Intrigued though - I have the same feeling about the somewhat off-putting title vs the reviews!

[skygiants]

The title is probably doing great things for marketing to a very different set of people!

[kore]

I was completely put off by that title and wouldn't have picked up the book without hearing so many people I knew really praising it.

[raven]

What did you think of the ending? I was enjoying it up to that point, but then fell over my annoyance at "book 1 of a trilogy just ends without resolution", even though obviously I can see in the direction of where that resolution should be. I did like the romance!

(Although, this is the book that prompted me on bluesky to decree anyone who writes a book set at Oxford or Cambridge must have at least visited either city, or read a book on it.)

[skygiants]

The ending didn't bother me that much, but I had genarti to go before me and forewarn me -- otherwise I think I would have gone in blithely expecting it to be a standalone and run facefirst into that assumption to unpleasant effect.

(honestly it really makes me wonder why the book is nominally set in 'our' world at all ... existing history has so little to do with it that you could very easily set it one universe over and just make up a university that works the way you'd like it to!)

[sovay]

(honestly it really makes me wonder why the book is nominally set in 'our' world at all ... existing history has so little to do with it that you could very easily set it one universe over and just make up a university that works the way you'd like it to!)

Especially since its main setting is already a Scandinavian Ruritania: there is a Ljosland in our world, but it's a village in southern Norway as opposed to a small island nation at the latitude of the Arctic Circle. The book would not have suffered from being a fantasy of manners, especially since its plot could have taken both halves of that designation literally.

(I read this book expecting to like it from friendlist reviews and bounced sharply off it, which didn't help anything.)

[genarti]

I knew there was going to be a sequel because by the time I got around to reading it, I'd seen a couple of people mention picking up or anticipating the sequel. So I wasn't totally taken aback, even though I didn't know whether or not the book had been originally written as a standalone. At any rate, I didn't mind it; to be honest, after the speed with which the romance progressed once it got rolling, I was delighted not to have everything tied up in a tidy bow! I'm not surprised to hear mileage varies on that one, though.

[antisoppist]

I'd assumed it was an encyclopedia of types of fairies and also that it would be twee.

"being bad at over-wintering in a small Scandinavian town whose inhabitants are constantly judging them for not knowing how to chop wood" is totally selling it to me though because this was basically my early 20s.

[skygiants]

It really was a very charming element of the book, the first page is her arriving at her rented cottage and realizing that she has no idea how to light the fireplace ...

[lirazel]

In fact it was much less agonizingly twee than suggested by the title and I was not allergic to it; it was a fun time!

This is so good to hear! I will have to read this one!

I think I forgot to mention what the leads are actually doing for most of the book, which is 'being bad at over-wintering in a small Scandinavian town whose inhabitants are constantly judging them for not knowing how to chop wood.'

This made me laugh very hard.

[skygiants]

I hope you enjoy it, it was a very pleasant way to pass a couple evenings!

[mildred_of_midgard]

Hi, I saw this on my network page, and maybe you can help clarify something for me! This is not the first time I've seen readers be confused about when the book is set. And yet in my copy, the book is formatted as journal entries, and the title of the first chapter is "20th October, 1909." In very large font that I find difficult to miss. Is that just because I have the Kindle copy and everyone else is reading the hard copy, which is different? Or is it just easier to miss than I realize?

Anyway, Nthing the comment that I wouldn't have picked this up based on the title for the same reason, and only did when rachelmanija reviewed it positively, and found it quite readable! I also would have preferred it without romance, but I'm a pretty hard sell on romances.

[skygiants]

FASCINATING. I was definitely reading the hard copy, and I clearly remember at one point being struck by the fact that I had no idea when it was set and flipping back to the beginning of the chapter/entry I was reading to see if it had a helpful date on it and seeing 'SOMETHING NOVEMBER' with no year given, and throwing up my metaphorical hands. But that doesn't mean there wasn't a clear and obvious date on the very first page that I accidentally skipped right over, and it just didn't occur to me to go back that far.

[mildred_of_midgard]

Yeah, the subsequent chapters in my copy don't have years either, but the first chapter did, and I picked up on it immediately. Anyway, 1909 explains the films and the lack of WWI!

[kore]

I have the Kindle too, and from what I can tell "1909" occurs twice in the text-- once in the TOC, and yes, once right at the beginning. She loses track of time with the king, and then the Jan and Feb months aren't given a year. There's no search results for 1909 or 1908. I think the timeless feeling is v deliberate, but that one mention of the year right at the start could have been easily cut.

[genarti]

Oh interesting! I do remember leafing back to the beginning to see if it specified, but it's possible that I failed to look at the right page, or something... Now I'm really curious whether our paper edition lacked that, or if I managed to miss it entirely and was just subconsciously like "hmm, something tells me that it's probably intended to be around the early 1900s, how mysterious." Unfortunately, it's gone back to the library.

[kore]

Oh I totally thought of Howl's Moving Castle too. Except this guy is tidy!

I didn't enjoy this as much as I thought I would and that kind of dismayed me -- loved the ethnography, loved the winter king, POE, the footnotes! I think part of it is I tend to bounce off romance tropes, plus the love interest irritated me too much. Idk. Honestly I wanted to like it.

[skygiants]

The winter king, the footnotes, and the various bits of Lore were definitely my favorite part as well!

[kore]

The king was perfect, so condescending and alien. I would have liked to have seen more of the court, and the human village, too. The ending was great, when she realized what they'd been doing for her.

I think I either wanted the love interest to be more alien, or for the romance to go more slowly and not take up so much room. I got kinda tured of reading her cliched emotional reactions to his attentions. Sophie was a lot more feisty!

I did like it, a lot! It seemed split into two very different halves, tho, and I wonder if that was bc of drafting issues...

[ceitfianna]

This tracks with my feeling on the book, loved the idea of it and parts of it but I didn't care about the characters and the voice it was written in created some odd moments. I liked the Fae better than the main character as he felt realer and messier.

I went back and reread my review and I found the structure of the book, the journals very limiting as it was all telling so that made the emotional beats harder to care about.

[skygiants]

I liked the characters fine, but I do agree with the other commenters that it would've been more compelling sans romance ... I did think the journal format was fun, though, but I'm a sucker for epistolary that can even halfway sell me on itself.

[chestnut_pod]

Another way in which Howl Jenkings > Dr. Brambleby: NO ACADEMIC FRAUD!

[skygiants]

It's TRUE (and honestly I was shocked that she wasn't angrier about the ACADEMIC FRAUD!) but I have to admit that in my heart of hearts I do think that Howl Jenkins would have committed academic fraud in a heartbeat if he thought it would be convenient.

[kore]

I totally think Howl would, at least while heartless, but he'd also be way too lazy to carry out a scheme requiring the tiniest bit of effort. (Could be being too mean! He was just so delightfully awful.)

[chestnut_pod]

I'M mad about the academic fraud! Dealbreaker! Who cares if he is a faerie; won't somebody consider the sanctity of academic honesty?!

[genarti]

Yeah, the lack of real interpersonal consequences on that one did contribute to the romance feeling a bit speedrun to me, I think. I'd honestly kind of forgotten about it, which is maybe a testament to how much screen time it gets, or rather doesn't... I was more outraged about the students getting landed with all his drudgery, even though that's not exactly unheard of and they didn't get taken too much advantage of as these things go.

The fact that nobody cared about the students sharing a bedroom did definitely help unmoor it from its theoretical time, though. That would've been so easy to fix, too! Ah well.

(I fully agree about Howl Jenkins, though. Slithering through!)

[kore]

SPEEDRUN, that was totally it.

[dhampyresa]

I enjoyed this book, though I too would have liked Brambleby to be less human. The sequel is already out, have you read it?

Also, POE IS BEST BOY and the lesbians were hella cute.