I absolutely devoured the first two books in this trilogy. I loved the highly original premise and found both stories beyond charming. The third is more of the same, but not quite to the same heights as the first two.

I would recommend avoiding this review if you haven’t read the prior two in the trilogy because it’ll be filled with spoilers. For more about Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries, you can read this guest review, and there’s also my review of Emily Wilde’s Map of the Otherlands. In terms of world-building and characterisation, these reviews pretty much describe book three as well, so I won’t rehash ground we’ve already covered.

So we dive straight in with how book three opens …

I’m very much a romance reader so I don’t usually read what happens after a couple declares their love for each other. That’s the climax of most romances I read. I then close the book and move on to the next story. In this novel, at the start we already know that Wendell and Emily love each other, but we don’t know that they can have a HEA with things being so unsettled around Wendell’s kingdom. Compendium of Lost Tales is really just about arranging circumstances so that the HEA can happen. I will say it is a very satisfying HEA, but you won’t get more out of me than that.

So we know Wendell and Emily love each other, but my, oh my, how Wendell loves Emily. Throughout the book, the things he says and does are so romantic, and not flowers and chocolate romance. This is the best kind of romance, one tailored to your love’s specific interests. Wendell peppers her with a wide variety of gifts and words which show just how deeply he knows her. This was lovely to read. These parts felt like an extended HEA.

There is a fair amount of adventure and derring-do in this book, but the first 65% didn’t have the suspense I’ve come to expect from this series. Here I must add a giant caveat. I read this during my first week back at work after four months of maternity leave. It was a challenging time personally and I do wonder how that might have impacted my experience. There is however a key turning point at that 65% mark at which point the story accelerates in pace and suspense. The last third positively flew by.

I had really been looking forward to Compendium, and I think I had built my expectations to be unreasonably high. Maybe that’s why this book felt a little flat to me. I had anticipated a book that would feature a hefty dose of romantic tension and then a REALLY hefty dose of tension introduced by the adventure that Emily and Wendell embark on. For me, both sources of tension lacked a bit, especially initially. The slight romantic conflict present throughout was obviously always going to be resolved because it seemed a relatively minor issue to me. The adventure only really started at 65% through the book. From that point, it definitely picked up. However, I do still think it is very good and I recommend it. I would be very curious to hear from the Bitchery what their thoughts are on this final instalment in the series.