DNF @ 55% because nothing interesting was happening + the LI is an insufferable entitled manchild


WRITING:
The writing at first was extremely difficult for me 😅. I don’t usually have a problem understanding the prose of a book, but the old-timey language, the long footnotes and the fairy terms were reeeeally scrambling my brain 😵‍💫. It wasn’t a problem with the world building or dense writing. It was genuinely the *english* used in this book that made things hard for me. This book was a painful reminder of how NOT fluent I am in english… I genuinely thought I should DNF early on because of how much difficulty I was having, but I persevered and the book became easier for me to read (either the prose got simpler or I got used to it, idk).

Regarding the way the story was told: this book was written like a mixture of a diary and an academic paper, which I think is a really interesting way of approaching this type of story (it’s like we’re reading Emily’s field notes and research), but it unfortunately I didn’t love the execution… 😕 It felt like some interesting scenes were glossed over, and the footnotes were mostly boring to me. I genuinely think the idea of writing this story as if it was Emily’s notes was great, but it simply didn’t work for me.


PLOT:
I read more than half of the book and I can barely tell you what happened in it. Emily went to a village to do research on fairies. Her colleague/friend/??????? followed her there for some reason. She met a fairy and traded some things with him. She found out a child in the village had been replaced/possessed by an evil fairy at some point. Some girls in the village got kidnapped by fairies, but Emily and Bambleby quickly found them… Idk, man………… I genuinely couldn’t tell you what the plot is, because everything that happened just felt like a bunch of random isolated events strung together; it didn’t feel like an actual story. The things I listed above were the most interesting events, and even then, each of them only lasted like 5 pages, at most… Everything else felt like boring filler. And, here’s the thing: I enjoy slice of life. I like cozy stories. But this was SO BORINGGGGGGGGGG!!!!!!!!!!! I’m sORRY!!!!!!! 😭 I decided to DNF when 2 village girls were kidnapped and Emily and Bambleby went after them and found them in like 1 chapter. Like, okay…….. The first bit of plot we get and it’s over in less than 10 pages?? Got it. Goodbye.


CHARACTERS:
Emily was an okay protagonist. I related a lot to her social anxiety and introversion, and I appreciate seeing a character who’s very academically driven. She was fine, but I never really cared about her, tbh.

The LI, on the other hand… Oof 😬. First of all, his name is *Wendell Bambleby*, which is absolutely ridiculous 🥴. Imagine telling people your man’s name is WENDELL BAMBLEBY!!! The embarrassementtttt 💀💀💀. Anyways. That’s not a big deal. You know what is a big deal? The fact that he SUCKS!!!!! This man is an absolute prick, and I wish him nothing but the worst. Bambleby is an arrogant, rude and entitled manchild. He forced everyone around him to do everything for him, and, on top of treating everyone like maids, he was also disrespectful to them. He was self-centered to the point of not caring about the fact that his students (or, as Emily so eloquently puts it, his “servants”) could be dead. He is awful!

Emily was constantly saying that Bambleby is charming, and everyone around him seemed to be drawn to him, but I genuinely couldn’t see WHY. The author didn’t actually show any of his charisma; she instead of repeatedly wrote that he’s charming without showing proof for the claim. 😐😐😐 So, Bambleby was supposed to be charming and eccentric in a fun way, but instead he was just an entitled asshole.

And, sure, he’ll probably have some development in the rest of the story (I presume), but I read more than half of this book and I wanted to rip my hair out. I think rich men who mistreat everyone around them should die. When Emily swung an axe and hit his arm I was genuinely disappointed she didn’t accidentally kill him. I think that would’ve been better for everyone. 🤷🏻


Also, some things about Bambleby’s career didn’t really make sense to me. He apparently has "a reputation for falsifying research”, yet he’s an extremely famous young professor in the most prestigious university in his field, he’s considered “one of the foremost dryadologists in the world”, he’s so respected and trusted that Emily’s most cited research paper (and the only one that earned her invitations to prestigious events) is the one she worked on with him, despite mistreating his students he always has people who WANT the opportunity to be mistreated by him because working with him would be great for their resumé, and he’s always invited to the most important scientific conferences every year… 🤨🤨🤨 HOW??? How can he be so famous and well regarded if he also has a reputation for *falsifying* his SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH????? The math isn’t mathing. 🤔

In addition to not really liking or caring about the characters individually, I also didn’t understand their relationship. They spoke as if they knew each other well (which I suppose they does, since they’d been friendly for a while) but their friendship/acquaintanceship wasn’t really properly established, so I always felt a little taken aback whenever they showed how well they knew each other. I wish the author had developed their friendship more. Also, I didn’t care enough about their relationship to want to see it develop into a romance, so… 🤷🏻


Long story short, this book was a big *yawn*.