FAERIES

They do exist.

We all grew up with fairy tales. Some of us still want to believe in magic creatures. This book seeks to instruct and delight with illustrated essays on the inhabitants of our imagination. Arranged as an encyclopedia of beings and beliefs, it presents histories of every creature you could think of, from the Banshees of Celtic myth to the Satyrs of the Greeks. Rumpelstiltskin appears alongside Morgan le Fay. Titania and Oberon preside. It has a capacious definition of fairies: They are “the embodiment of caprice—wild and unpredictable as their actions are determined by what best suits them at the moment….They are both a reflection of our desires and fears and a testament to the capacity of our own magical imagination.” This is, then, really a book of myths, and its lush illustrations show us how those myths inspired human art. Many of the pictures have a gauzy, Pre-Raphaelite feel to them—as if fairyland were the privileged province of Victorian girlhood or the opium-soaked visions of a voyeur. The wide range of the book leads to an overarching question: Is every creature of the wilderness a fairy? There is much learning here, but also much wishful thinking—this is less a coffee-table book of other worlds than a field guide to the fantastic. It invites us to look for creatures in the woodland, behind “sacred trees and rocks,” and to find “undines, selkies, and jinn [in] our prosaic, ironbound lives.” Prosaic grown-ups may lose patience with its preciousness. Children reared on anime or with their ironies honed on the internet may find the author’s tone a bit too patronizing or paternal—like an awestruck New Ager trying to convince you just how weird the world really is.

A lavishly illustrated guide to mythic creatures, full of longing for other worlds.