When mysterious faeries from other realms appear at her university, curmudgeonly professor Emily Wilde must uncover their secrets before it’s too late in this heartwarming, enchanting second installment of the Emily Wilde series.

Emily Wilde is a genius scholar of faerie folklore—she just wrote the world’s first comprehensive of encylopaedia of faeries. She’s learned many of the secrets of the Hidden Folk on her adventures . . . and also from her fellow scholar and former rival, Wendell Bambleby.

Because Bambleby is more than infuriatingly charming. He’s an exiled faerie king on the run from his murderous mother, and in search of a door back to his realm. So despite Emily’s feelings for Bambleby, she’s not ready to accept his proposal of marriage. Loving one of the Fair Folk comes with secrets and danger.

And she also has a new project to focus a map of the realms of faerie. While she is preparing her research, Bambleby lands her in trouble yet again, when assassins sent by Bambleby’s mother invade Cambridge. Now Bambleby and Emily are on another adventure, this time to the picturesque Austrian Alps, where Emily believes they may find the door to Bambley’s realm, and the key to freeing him from his family’s dark plans.

But with new relationships for the prickly Emily to navigate and dangerous Folk lurking in every forest and hollow, Emily must unravel the mysterious workings of faerie doors, and of her own heart.

Heather Fawcett has done it again. She successfully created a new fantasy wonderland filled with Fae, both deadly and delightful, and then sent Emily and Wendell on a quest that kept me turning pages until the wee hours of the morning. One of the things I enjoyed most about the first book was the way the story was told in a journal-like format. Thankfully not much has changed, and we still get to experience the story through Emily’s detailed journal entries.

The events of this book take place about a year after the end of book 1. Emily is still pondering Wendell’s marriage proposal, and they continue to adorably bicker-flirt at every turn. Emily has become obsessed with finding a back door into Wendell’s kingdom so he can go home, overthrow his Stepmother, and claim his throne. While concocting her plan, Emily began to focus on the work of a dryadologist by the name of Danielle de Grey. De Grey went missing decades ago while researching a species of faun, a type of hoofed fae, in the Austrian Alps. While most scholars believe that de Gray simply vanished, Emily believes that de Grey found a nexus, a door that connects more than two Faerie places, and either got lost inside it, or killed by the Folk that guard it.

Meanwhile, it appears that Wendell’s stepmother has started to send assassins to kill him. After a night of drinking and celebrating, Wendell awakes with what he thinks is a horrible hangover. Later that day during his lecture on faerie mounds, Wendell is attacked by grey sheerie. Basically, a gaggle of extremely deadly faerie assassins. Emily and Wendell win the fight, but Wendell is left exhausted and extremely weak. Soon after, Emily concludes that Wendell has been poisoned. And on his birthday too! The poison is not strong enough to kill him, but bad enough to make his magic painful to use, highly unpredictable, and extremely draining. Wendell needs to get home so they can stop his stepmother and find a cure before it’s too late. 

While revealing her plan to find the nexus, Emily unceremoniously deposits the faerie foot she has been (weirdly) carrying around on Wendell’s desk. After much cleaning, and complaining about the foot, Emily explains to Wendell that the foot is from one of De Grey’s traps in Austria. But the foot is from a faun that is predominately found in Wendell’s kingdom. Emily is convinced that the fauns have been using the nexus to travel to different realms across the globe, and the foot will help lead them to the fauns. And the nexus.

We are introduced to several new human friends in this novel, Emily’s niece, Ariadne, and the Dryadology Department Head, Dr. Farris Rose. Both accompany Emily, Wendell, Shadow, and the foot, as they head to the Austrian Alps in search of the nexus. We get to spend some time with Poe, our sharp-fingered faerie friend from Ljosland, and make a new, very toothy, fox-like faerie pal named Snowbell. And of course, we get to meet the whole cast of characters in the town of St. Liesl, Austria, where Emily is sure the nexus is located. We even get to meet Wendell’s cat, Orga!

This was one of my most anticipated reads of 2024 and boy did it live up to every single one of my expectations. The second installment of the Emily Wilde series was as much, if not more, fun than the first. I absolutely cannot wait for book 3 so I can venture back to Faerie and see what kind of trouble Emily, Wendell, Shadow, and Orga get into on their next adventure.