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Emily Wilde's Map of the Otherlands Published by Random House Worlds on January 16, 2024 Genres: Fiction / Fantasy / Action & Adventure
Format: ARC, eBook
Source: Netgalley
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When mysterious faeries from other realms appear at her university, curmudgeonly professor Emily Wilde must uncover their secrets before it’s too late, in this heartwarming, enchanting second installment of the Emily Wilde series.
Emily Wilde is a genius scholar of faerie folklore who just wrote the world’s first comprehensive encyclopaedia of faeries. She’s learned many of the secrets of the Hidden Ones on her adventures . . . and also from her fellow scholar and former rival Wendell Bambleby.
Because Bambleby is more than infuriatingly charming. He’s an exiled faerie king on the run from his murderous mother and in search of a door back to his realm. And despite Emily’s feelings for Bambleby, she’s not ready to accept his proposal of marriage: Loving one of the Fair Folk comes with secrets and dangers.
She also has a new project to focus on: a map of the realms of faerie. While she is preparing her research, Bambleby lands her in trouble yet again, when assassins sent by his mother invade Cambridge. Now Bambleby and Emily are on another adventure, this time to the picturesque Austrian Alps, where Emily believes they may find the door to Bambleby’s realm and the key to freeing him from his family’s dark plans.
But with new relationships for the prickly Emily to navigate and dangerous Folk lurking in every forest and hollow, Emily must unravel the mysterious workings of faerie doors and of her own heart.
Book Two of the Emily Wilde Series
It is a fact well-known that an exiled Faerie prince on the run from his homicidal mother must be in want of… a cat. Okay, maybe not, but that’s the goal in Emily Wilde’s Map of the Otherlands. Wendell Bambleby is on the hunt for a door back to his own kingdom of Faerie, and Emily is determined to write another book about it. So determined, in fact, that she alienates her own niece, ignores a marriage proposal from said Faerie prince, and decides to carry a backpack containing severed limbs into the Alps on the hunt for the correct door.
So where does the cat come in? Well, the cat belongs to? Is a friend of? Wendell and was left behind in the Faerie palace where aforementioned homicidal Faerie Queen now resides. Wendell’s magic is on the fritz and he needs the cat and can’t go to retrieve it even if he could find the right door. So what’s a world-renowned Faerie scholar to do? Find the door, break a Faerie time loop, traverse a particularly murderous piece of Faerie, find the cat, survive the Queen, return to the present realm — and, importantly, the present time — save the day, and live happily ever after…
Well, that’s how it would happen in a fairy tale anyway. That isn’t quite what happens here.
This volume is an elegant mystery. What happened to the previous scholars who came to this part of the Alps and were never seen again? Why is Wendell’s magic acting up? How is Emily going to deal with her new Faerie friends when she can barely even make a human one? Like Emily in a social interaction, I feel like things are going on in this book under the surface that I can’t quite put together. It left me feeling vaguely frustrated, but I believe that’s a failing of the way I engage with the story and not a fault of the author. This is a very charming tale, in an old-fashioned Pride & Prejudice kind of way. If that sounds interesting to you, this book releases on Tuesday, I suggest you give it a try.
