maybe I can never turn my brain off enough to get into cozy fantasy? it’s paradoxical that this felt overly slow, yet overstuffed with misadventures of varying stakes and a finale that was rushed in the last 50 pages. I was happy to read footnotes, until I realized halfway in that they stopped being helpful for world-building and became spaces for emily to agonize over something trivial.

I picked emily wilde specifically for the “sweet” romantic angle and less so for fairies, but it felt like I was reading an unnaturally fast progression of rivals to lovers. I had to squint to read into the chemistry between emily and wendell. as a howl pendragon girl, I’m also not immune to a fussy pixie dream man, but I couldn’t buy that someone as unprofessional and lazy about fieldwork as wendell could also be a respected scholar who’s invited to academic conferences.

it did leave a strange taste in my mouth to find out

emily was willing to place citizens’ lives second to completing her research and exhausting her time in the field. and it seemed to me that she only got away with this kind of thinking because wendell never told on her, or a villager picked up on this attitude

. so I’m just disappointed that these were the “cozy and wholesome” antics I ended up signing up for.