Hypothesis: Celine will learn to manage her expectations with hyped-up books. Experiment: Celine reads hyped-up books and logs findings through reviews. Conclusion: Celine is That Bitch™️ who doesn't learn her lesson.

Look, enough time had passed by and enough reviews had been read for me to have accepted that this wasn't going to be as good as I wanted. But dear God had I had the hope that I would be pleasantly surprised. What did I get for it? Boredom. This book simply failed to be engaging or enraging enough to keep my interest despite being about literal faeries and their research.

Credit where credit's due. The prose was pleasant to read and the style facilitated greater immersion. It convinced me that, yes, we're in the 1900s and the protagonist is a scholar, and everything was finely described. The footnotes were fun (though I don't think you can ever beat Saint Death's Daughter in this) and there weren't overly many words that make you wonder why the author didn't bother with a glossary.

That said, I think using a journal format simply did not work for the story the author wanted to tell. It suits Emily's character well, and that's it. Sadly, I pretty much hated Emily as a character the whole way through.

From the first, it was very clear that Emily is awkward and socially inept to the point that even I will tell you she's autistic, though this isn't confirmed by the author. She is plainly unlikeable but the thought that the portrayal is meant to be that way made me think "Am I the asshole here?" She is condescending to her hosts and the community she is to live with for months. That doesn't make her a bad person, right? If anything, it's accurate to British scholars! And if she's so focused on her research that it's the only reason she attempts to help the townspeople, it's just because she's so autistic!

Beyond Emily's inability to keep herself alive in a foreign land and hostile climes, more troubling to me was Emily's entire beloved field of dryadology and more particularly her own methods of practising her """science.""" The other example we get is from Bambleby, who simply Makes Shit Up. Yes, it's just as discouraging as it gets considering this book is ostensibly partially about scholarship.

Listen, I know (I KNOW) this is a work of fiction and labelled as cosy besides. But with what Emily gets up to, you would think that there's more than a little space here for nuance when it comes to the ethics of meddling in the affairs of your research subject matter. Like??? Anthropologists go through a lot of shit to do their work, and Emily's either making friends or enemies with sentient magical species who could kill her or worse? None of this is science, Ms. Heather Fawcett, and there did not seem like there was even an attempt to pretend that it is. And that's not even the extent of my complaints.

Somehow, this book manages to have so much going on but also just no ability to catch my attention. I could blame this on being a cosy fantasy, but there is action, there are stakes. There is, arguably, romance. Again, I could lay this blame at the feet of the journal format, and it's my main theory on why I was so fucking bored. I'm accepting counterarguments!

Speaking of romance, I think this book is proof that you need to at least like some aspects of the characters to like their romance. I hated both Emily and Bambleby (though his history intrigued me and makes their relationship complicated enough that my ears pricked up [spoiler: it wasn't fucking used enough and no I won't read book two to get it]) despite liking every other character. As far as I'm concerned, that's proof the author can do better but simply did not.

There was no chemistry, and it felt more like the author wanted romance but couldn't be bothered to cultivate it. The love confession made me feel something and was in essence the turning point of the book for me, but you can't convince me Emily feels anything akin to love for Bambleby. Or even hate. Or even apathy.

I'm glad (relieved) to say that I finally got invested in the story 3/4 of the way through. It was even almost enough for me to revise my star rating, but then I got upset again thinking about what happened before. I'm a romantic at heart, okay, and I do love me some star-crossed lovers, but you really can't throw a bunch of tropes into the mix and call that a recipe for a romance. I'd accept this premise with any other characters, for fucking real.

All this to say... Idk man, this could just be a matter of taste. But the whole time I was reading I was wondering what other people see in this and I'm failing to grasp. But you can decide if it's a me problem or a book problem once you read it yourself. It's worth that... I think.