Thank you to Del Rey Books for providing an advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review!
One-Sentence Summary:
Emily Wilde returns to contemplate her future and explore an Austrian village, her companion’s potential to rule a faerie realm she has yet to find. and the mysterious disappearance of a fellow scholar from years before.
My Review:
Oh. My. God. I really loved the first Emily Wilde book for what it made me feel on a random Sunday morning, but I honestly enjoyed this one even more.
First up, let’s talk about some characters as I wax poetic in multiple parts of this review about how the perspective influences everything and my undying appreciation for it. I wouldn’t say there are as many relevant background characters in Map as there were Encyclopaedia, but the side characters that are important really shine. We had Professor Rose, an accusatory professor working with Emily and Wendell begrudgingly while trying to prove their lack of credibility, and Ariadne, Emily’s niece and an aspiring academic hoping to assist her. Even though Emily doesn’t dedicate as much attention to either of them as she does her studies (and Wendell), Fawcett still fleshes out both well. Rose is able to endear himself to the reader more than I expected, and Ariadne is understood much more by our narrator by the end of the novel. In terms of Emily and Wendell, there was much of the same in a way I loved. Emily, while acknowledging others around her more post-Scandinavian adventure, keeps her textbook reservedness and research-oriented mind. Wendell has his bouts of sloth and rage, as he did in book one, but he also has the same softer side for Emily and ambition. I didn’t feel blindsided by any of their traits or actions, which is always a fear with sequels.
I think I’ve mostly touched on interpersonal relationships there, but I also admire how the romance in this book panned out. There was just enough to satisfy me, instantly enamored with the romantic aspect since book one, but not so much that I wouldn’t recommend it to friends who like less romantic fantasy novels. The focus is, as always, the research and mystery.
For plot, I’m once again going to talk about how much I love the style of writing too. We have a clear catalyst for this piece of the arc and our journey to Austria, and by the end, there’s a perfect balance of finality and actions yet to come. There is, again, more of what book one started, both in terms of the incomplete storyline about Wendell’s throne and the great transitions from mystery to mystery to plot point that align well with Emily’s own thoughts and priorities. One of my favorite things about this series is what a readable fantasy it is in the sense that I can space out for a moment on one page and still understand the next. It’s a quality whose rarity sort of turned me away from adult fantasy this year, but I really loved how simultaneously academic and welcoming the tone of this one was.
Overall, I’d recommend this to lovers of all sorts of doorways in the fantasy genre. As a fan of epic fantasy and heist fantasies, I was never bored, and even though I don’t love mysteries as much, the academic mysteries in this installment had me on the edge of my seat. I’m talking this book up so much, but I’ve done the exact same thing in the messages of all of my reader friends. I’m so happy I was able to get an early copy of this and physically cannot wait for book three!!!
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️/5
The Fiction Feature 