★★★★☆ Capable of anything

Emily Wilde's Map of the Otherlands

Heather Fawcett

Emily Wilde's Map of the Otherlands is the second book in Heather Fawcett's Emily Wilde series. (It is currently the last, but we are informed at the end that a third is on its way. I will certainly read it.)

My first insight into Emily Wilde's real nature occurred early in Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries. A changeling has taken up residence in the home of Mord and Aslaug Samson, endangering them and their village. Emily climbs up to the changeling's lair and interrogates it. She is cold and cruel and terrifyingly effective. Emily Wilde is no curmudgeonly professor with a heart of gold -- she's a curmudgeonly professor with a heart of silicon. I don't know if I would like Emily Wilde if I knew her in the real world, but as the hero of a fantasy novel, I love her.

Since Encyclopaedia Emily has gotten tenure at Cambridge University. She has also acquired a proposal of marriage from fellow Cambridge prof Wendell Bambleby, who, she discovered in Encyclopaedia, is actually a faery prince/king, driven from his home by his stepmother. Although Emily certainly feels affection for Wendell, perhaps even love, she's not enthusiastic about the prospect of marriage

... the thought of marrying anyone makes me wish to retreat to the nearest library and hide myself among the stacks; marriage has always struck me as a pointless business, at best a distraction from my work and at worst a very large distraction from my work coupled with a lifetime of tedious social obligations.

Still, there is no denying that Emily seems to have gone a bit soft. It is difficult to imagine the Emily of the beginning of Otherlands confronting a changeling with an iron nail and compelling its submission.

I say "of the beginning" because, before the book reaches its end, we see that Emily hasn't lost her edge.

One last thing: the publisher's blurbs describe both installments of the Emily Wilde series as "heartwarming" and "enchanting". I will not say those adjectives are unequivocally wrong, because a good book is a different book to each new reader. But as regards my vision of the books, they could not be more misleading. Emily is, as Wendell Bambleby describes her, "capable of anything". "Anything" includes terror and battle.

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