Emily Wilde's Map of the OtherlandsReview posted October 22, 2024.
Books on Tape, 2024. 12 hours, 5 minutes.
Review written October 10, 2024, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review
Oh, I love these Emily Wilde books so much! And Ell Potter gets her voice exactly right - a scholarly British accent with multiple diversions into the historical background of things she encounters or similar tales of encounters with the Fae.
For Emily is a distinguished dryadologist in this alternate version of Cambridge, England, where faeries are real and interact with our world - and people study them.
After her adventures in the Otherlands in the first volume, Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries, where she was rescued by her colleague, Wendell Bambleby, a faerie king in exile, Emily is now working on a new book - a Map of the Otherlands. And she also vows that as her next adventure, she'll save Wendell's life for a change.
And she gets an opportunity to do that all too soon. His stepmother, the same one who usurped his throne, poisons him on his birthday and then sends assassins into Cambridge to finish him off. After fighting them off, Emily convinces him to go on an expedition to the Alps. She thinks she has a lead on finding a doorway to his kingdom.
But it's not a romantic trip for two. The department head insists on going along because of the research and in exchange for not reporting Bambleby's falsifying research in the past. And Emily's niece Ariadne also plans to come along. She's been working as Emily's overeager and overly talkative assistant for some time, and can't be dissuaded, but she does show signs of having what it takes to be a good dryadologist.
Most of their research involves trying to track down a dryadologist who went missing some fifty years before and may have found a door between multiple faerie realms. But there's plenty of research and exploration to do in order to find her, and plenty of adventures that show that something about that poison is still affecting Wendell. So when things all come together, it's up to Emily to take a quest into Faerie to get what's needed to save his life. But can she stay safe from the current queen?
Again, I can't even express how much I love listening to these books - the scholarly tone of one who has read everything ever written on the topic of the Faerie realm and remembers it all is just perfect. I love Emily's extreme capability and her nerve when in a tight place, plus her care and attention for the smaller creatures of Faerie, who tend to get scorn from many.
Altogether just an absolutely brilliant series, and I'm thrilled to discover that there's one more book coming out in February. Even though I'm listening to it first, this set is one I'd like to own to be able to come back to.