Many, if not most, of the books I read these days come in the mail in hopes of review. Sometimes, however, I like to choose a book the old-fashioned way: browsing randomly through the shelves of a bookstore, looking for something that catches my eye. Recently, while my children were scampering about a local bookshop seeking their own literary treasures, I spied the cover of Emily Wilde's Encyclopedia of Faeries on prominent display. Of course, a closer examination was in order.

At first, I assumed it was a reference book, some new attempt to compete with the masterwork on the subject, Katharine Briggs' An Encyclopedia of Fairies: Hobgoblins, Brownies, Bogies, & Other Supernatural Creatures (reviewed here, way back in 2001). It's not.

Emily Wilde's Encyclopedia of Faeries is a novel by Heather Fawcett. The premise was enough to convince me to take it home.

The titular Wilde is a professor of folklore at Cambridge, and she is writing the Encyclopedia of Faeries for her world, which is very much like our own except that the existence of faeries is commonly accepted, even if relatively little is known about them. Her encyclopedia is an attempt to catalogue the many varieties of high and low faeries that have been discovered throughout the world but, to finish it, she needs to study the rarely examined folklore of Ljosland, a (fictional) Scandinavian island nation off the coast of Norway. She (along with her big dog Shadow) arrives in the village of Hrafnsvik full of ambition but woefully unprepared for the rigors of the harsh winter environment or the close-knit, tight-lipped community there. Because she's really not good at interacting with people, she has trouble making connections with the local population.

She is, to be blunt, socially awkward, and she is prone to giving offense without intent or awareness. For good or ill, she is soon joined there by fellow professor (and academic rival) Wendell Bambleby, who for his own reasons hopes to ride on the coattails of her research. However, his natural charm soon helps to win over the locals, and her research advances accordingly ... until she discovers a changeling child in the town, and a young couple from the village is stolen away. Soon, against her better judgment and in defiance of the standards of academic research, Wilde finds herself deeply involved in the affairs of Hrafnsvik and the Hidden Folk who occupy the surrounding landscape.

The book is presented as if it were a copy of Wilde's research journals, although the strategy isn't entirely effective; for the most part, the book is written as a straightforward first-person narrative, with most of the text not at all the sort of thing a researcher would write in her field journal. There are some portions, however, that do read as if lifted from her notes and, as a charming aside, she includes a sample of folktales from the local tradition (presumably all original to this book since the nation of Ljosland doesn't actually exist).

Oh, and Bambleby has a secret and, although Wilde suspects the truth from the start, there is much more to his story than she imagines. (Shadow, too, has a secret, known only to Wilde, although for the most part he's along to be a Very Good Boy, as all dogs will be if given the chance.) There's a romance, too, which was probably inevitable but feels unnecessary and, on Wilde's part, a little abrupt.

Emily Wilde's Encyclopedia of Faeries is an excellent example of modern world-building. Fawcett's Ljosland -- and, by extension, the rest of the planet -- feels very real, even with the insertion of fey societies. The author has created a very special set of characters and, in the process, has crafted an entire culture -- similar, but not identical to other Scandinavian societies -- as well as a unique folkloric tradition.

While the book focuses almost entirely on the lore of a single fictional nation, there is a lot of room in this sandbox for Fawcett to play. This is, it turns out, the first book in a series (four books to date, I'm unsure if there are more to come), so I look forward to learning more about Emily Wilde's world.