HIGHLIGHTS
~time to make a prophecy happen
~no one is who you think they are
~many vipers, one Cobra
~villains do it with style
~“You don’t have to kill if you don’t like it. I’ll kill them for you.” “Kill who?” “Everyone.”

Take a Thing you love about Brennan’s YA. Now, imagine the Thing is a coin. In fact, every Thing you love, have ever loved, about any and all of Brennan’s YA novels, is now a shiny gold coin.

Reader, Long Live Evil is a full-on DRAGON’S HOARD of gold – and mixed in with all the coins are gems and sceptres and ancient magic blades, ie entirely NEW Things that we have not seen before from Brennan, Things that sparkle and seduce in equal measure! TREASURES GALORE, fellow readers, treasures galore!

(And if you are BEREFT and have never read Brennan’s YA, fear not! I believe all her books are still in print, and you can pick up any and all that sound good to you. Plus, Long Live Evil requires absolutely no prior familiarity with Brennan’s works. If this is your first time reading one of her books, then WELCOME, and also, brace yourself, because this may be her best book yet, and it is one HELL of a ride!)

Rae has cancer. It’s…very bad. So when she’s offered an out, however impossible it sounds, she goes for it – and ends up in the world of her favourite series, Time of Iron.

In book one – the book she remembers the least about.

In the body of a minor villainess – and Rae does remember that this particular villain? Is getting executed tomorrow morning.

Cue a most audacious plan.

>Only now did Rae see stories needed more romantic interludes and fewer assassins.<

Long Live Evil is just so much freaking FUN! Brennan’s signature humour is on full display here, lambasting genre tropes and stereotypes left, right and centre. Fabulous, witty characters run rings around each other, forming plots to forward The Plot, sharing inside jokes and creating secret handshakes in-between battling monsters, politicking, and doing their best to manifest a prophecy.

But it’s balanced by a not-funny-at-all incisiveness, sometimes wry and usually sharp and very often fucking angry. Rae gets to think – and say – a lot of things a lot of AFAB people think and feel about bodies and health and politics and Fantasy, particularly vaguely-Medieval, patriarchal High or Epic Fantasy, and it’s a breath of fresh air in what can sometimes feel like a very stale genre. The number of times I thought FINALLY SOMEBODY SAID IT as I was reading! I lost count.

Because yep, you can absolutely ‘just’ read this book and allow it to entertain you, and I promise, you will be entertained–

>“You speak wicked blasphemy,” hissed Emer.

“Fluently,” said Key.<

–especially since Brennan is a master of writing ‘easy’ books – ones that don’t require checking a dictionary every few paragraphs, or a conspiracy board of red wool and coloured pins to keep track of everything, or that leave you exhausted after a chapter or two because damn, reading this is WORK. Reading Long Live Evil is not work. Reading Long Live Evil is a relief, and a roller-coaster, and an intensely moreish delight. And the ease-of-reading quality is priceless, okay, we need to talk about it more when we discuss books. I don’t know how someone undergoing cancer treatment would do, but I was able to read Long Live Evil when I didn’t think I could read anything at all, due to pain or ADD or *waves hand vaguely*. That MATTERS.

It matters that this is a book you can just relax into and enjoy…right up until it grabs you by the throat, anyway.

(I mean, you’ll definitely enjoy that too! But I wouldn’t call the experience relaxing.)

>People say, I’ll give anything. The universe listens. But the universe doesn’t listen when you say, Wait, not that.<

But – to return to my original point – if you have the desire and/or spoons to give Long Live Evil more of your attention, you will be rewarded. You will find sharp edges only barely hidden by the laughter and glamour; the knife strapped to the thigh, the venom in the pretty viper, the guile behind the innocence. Long Live Evil can be read as pure entertainment, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that: it is EXCELLENT entertainment, and any book that makes you laugh, brings you joy, is one to treasure. (There is so much laughter and so much joy in this book.) But it’s important that you know that Long Live Evil can also be read as an intricate, thorny, meta knockout; hiding clues in plain sight; containing layers and layers of spiralling depth; scything into complicated issues; unafraid of dark, heavy themes; and as merciless as it is hilarious.

>Rahela’s voice cut like a dagger in a lady’s dainty hand. The weapon might be pearl-handled, but it would hurt.<

It’s entirely your call how you choose to engage with this book. Neither is wrong – both are fantastic! But it’s not many storytellers who can give you that option of one or the other in the same book, and Brennan deserves so many gold stars for it, for being able to do it. Most of the time, a story is fun entertainment or deep and meaty: few are both, and even rarer are the ones that manage to do both well, to be great examples of both. Long Live Evil is one of those rare cases, proof that you don’t need to sacrifice depth or emotional complexity for ease-of-reading, exhibit A in any argument that high-brow language, dense prose, or an overly convoluted structure isn’t necessary to pull off a deep, and deeply satisfying, story.

It’s marvellous.

>She knew how this story went. Moth, meet flame. Compass, meet true north. Cat hair, meet expensive sweater.<

There’s so much to dig into, in this book; so much to revel in. Rae’s decision to be a villain is one that doesn’t immediately seem like an okay call – sure, the idea of being a villain is fun, but do you really want to be awful? But it makes perfect sense: Rae has been transported inside a novel, hasn’t she? So none of what she’s experiencing is really real; none of the places, and certainly not the people. Which means it’s totally okay to be a villain – if anything, this is the best possible time to be a villain, because for once you can be as evil as you want and no one will get hurt. You can let loose! No more need to hold back! Go big or (never) go home, Rae!

>“For your information, guys, once I saw through a glass darkly, but now I see plain.<

And so much of that is clearly a result of her abrupt freedom from cancer, her sudden possession of a healthy and kind of ridiculously sexy body that allows her to do so much that she wasn’t able to before. No wonder she goes a bit manic, a bit wild! Who wouldn’t? Just the relief of not being in pain would do it, even without suddenly suddenly being able to think clearly without struggling, having more energy than she knows what to do with, or being cast as the object of desire that she’s never had the chance to be. (And yes, that last one especially comes with a whole slew of new problems, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to appreciate about it.)

There’s an almost endless number of things to love about Long Live Evil, but that – the way Rae’s illness, and then its absence, shapes her and her actions – was such an important, personal thing for me. I have never, thank fuck, been in Rae’s position, but I am chronically ill and disabled and insofar as anyone can get it, I get it. I, too, would go a(t least a) little bit around the bend if I was magically healed without warning; I can imagine the rush, the euphoria, how impossible it would be to take anything seriously after that. Probably many people who found themselves in a book would assume none of the characters are real people – it’s not a very illogical assumption! – but it must be even easier to do so when you’re also high on not being sick any more. Almost everything about Rae, and certainly everything she thinks and does inside the book (that being the novel-within-the-novel, ie not Long Live Evil but Time of Iron) comes back to this.

>Marius felt his mouth thin like a piece of paper folded sharply in half. “Alcohol is a crutch.”

“Useful things, crutches,” drawled the Cobra. “Ever see anyone using a crutch they didn’t need?”<

That being said, don’t get your hopes up for an actual villain – because Rae really isn’t one. Oh, she’s not nice – she has no interest at all in being nice—

>Being nice was nice. Being nasty got shit done.<

–but she’s not suddenly stabbing people who annoy her; she’s not pro-torture; and while she’s very into mocking people, she doesn’t blackmail anyone. Rae isn’t evil, and I think that’s very much the point, because one of the many questions asked by this book is who gets called a villain, and why, and do they deserve it?

(And the answer is mostly, the powerless, because they’re powerless, and no.)

>Everyone wanted to be on the side of the winners. If it was the victim’s fault, no one had to defend her. Nobody had to fear horror could happen to them. It was more convenient if the victim deserved her fate.

So Rae would do everyone a favour, and deserve it.<

Rae isn’t evil…but she thinks she is, and that is a tragedy and horror all by itself. Why does she think she’s evil? Because that’s what the world tells you, if you’re AFAB and not-nice. It’s certainly what you hear when you get really, terribly sick, and you’re blamed for – just about everything. For being not-nice about being in pain, or the ‘friends’ who abandon you, or the world that would really prefer you just not exist. Rereading the first couple of chapters after having read the rest of the book, it’s so clear that Rae identifies with the villains because she, too, is angry. And she’s been told that anger is bad. That her anger is bad, specifically. She’s absorbed, at some point – probably gradually, having heard it for far too long – that her anger makes her bad. A bad person. A villain.

It doesn’t, but it’s heartbreakingly easy to see why she thinks so. So if you find yourself thinking that Rae is a very bad villain – it’s because she isn’t one. It’s because her idea of evil has gotten so immensely twisted, that she thinks being nasty is the same as being evil. It’s because she thinks she deserves to be treated the way villains are treated in stories. And she thinks that because she’s had it beaten into her.

>If your suffering was ugly, stories said you deserved it.<

The question who gets called a villain? is either the heart of the book or very close to it – but what I found really fun was how Brennan takes it in a very meta direction. Because of course this book is meta – how could it not be, with a modern Fantasy fan actually ending up inside her favourite series? She knows the tropes, the archetypes, the genre conventions! And so the book we’re reading (as opposed to Time of Iron which Rae read and is now inside, although maybe that series too…) is/are in conversation with – basically the whole genre. And its fans. Brennan has done this before – most obviously in The Other Lands – but this is much more overt, much more direct, much more pointed. And while all of it – including the who gets called a villain? question – can (and should) absolutely be applied to the real world too, there’s a lot in here about, or pertinent to, how fans view and engage with fiction and fictional people.

>“If the Emperor were real, he would be horrifying.”

“Lucky he’s not real,” Rae snapped back.<

This was one of my favourite parts of the book – gleefully seeing all the ways in which our conclusions about characters (*cough*people*cough*) can be so utterly incorrect; all the ways in which we can completely misinterpret what we see. For example, the radiant beauty’s adorable clumsiness? She’s not deliberately making herself seem helpless in order to wrap men around her little finger; nor has she been written as clumsy to make her seem cute by the author (if there IS an author…) of Time of Iron.

It’s that she needs glasses. !!!

And there’s a lot of that – not exactly misunderstandings, but…misleadingings?…where the absence of a crucial detail or two, or a misinterpretation of available information, has resulted in an, at best, dramatically incomplete picture of the people Rae is now living among – and more often, the picture isn’t just incomplete, it’s outright wrong. Upending the fictional fandom’s understanding of Time of Iron’s characters, if only they knew – which also mean’s, Rae’s understanding of those characters.

Which is extremely plot-relevant.

>It was possible Rae had underestimated the maidens.<

(It does beg the question – who is writing Time of Iron, and why have they kept back those crucial details that completely change everyone’s perception of the affected characters? Is it deliberate, or an accident? If it’s deliberate, why? If it’s an accident, does that mean the characters are somehow more than what’s been written? Or maybe there isn’t a writer, maybe Time of Iron is just a kind of record of real events that are happening to real people in some other world – but that just brings us back to the same question slightly rephrased: who or what is doing the recording? And why are they leaving out what they’re leaving out?)

>[Spoiler] gazed at her as though catching sight of his own soul in a mirror. As if he were a starving shark, she the only blood in the world, and all else bitter waters.<

Now that I’ve covered all my thoughtful, scholarly Deep Analysis: hi, I fucking love the romance. I do. I love it so much. I NEED MORE PEOPLE TO SHRIEK WITH ABOUT IT. You had better believe that come release day, I am diving right back into this book so I get to experience the whole romance ALL OVER AGAIN.

The love story is – oh, it’s fucked-up and so broken and it’s utterly delicious. Brennan GOES THERE, folx, she has officially Gone Where Other Authors Fear To Tread (again) in giving us a genuinely messed-up love interest (seriously, when was the last time you saw one of those??? IT’S BEEN A WHILE) and no, there are no extenuating circumstances, there’s no understandable reasoning, he’s not secretly good. There’s a little bit of a sob story, sure, but that’s not what made him this way.

And I love it. The devotion from a monster, the living nightmare who worships the ground you walk on, who would burn down whole worlds at your word – sorry-not-sorry, that is my EVERYTHING.

YES.

GOOD.

EXCELLENT.

This is the relationship dynamic I’ve been craving, and I am finally Fed. *chef’s kiss*

(I also, you know, literally screamed out loud when The Thing happened, and then I cried and didn’t pick the book up again for days, and hi, I can’t remember ever being so invested in a straight romance, what in the actual hells. WHAT DARK WITCHERY IS THIS???)

>Beneath her hand she felt the rhythmic thunder of his heart. As though he were a real living person. As though she held the drums of war in the hollow of her hand.<

(oh, right, THAT witchery!!!)

Look. Look. I don’t know what else to tell you. Long Live Evil is amazing. It will make you laugh and shriek and feel All The Things. It is so much fun. It has so much to say. It is a love-letter to the genre and also an indictment of it and it’s right both ways. It’s a book about books and a story about stories and it is exactly what it wants to be, accomplishes everything it wants to accomplish. It is silly and serious and stupendous.

I must insist you preorder it right away.

Thank you Netgalley and the publisher for this ARC in exchange for a honest review.

I hate DNFing books, especially when they’re ARCs, but unfortunately Long Live Evil wasn’t the right book for me.

This turned out to be one of my fastest DNF, since the beginning I couldn’t connect with the characters— who seemed to be mere unexplored archetypes— and the world building felt off. I also found out that I don’t really like reading fantasy books with the main character coming from the real world. I was invested in the fictional story, Times of Iron, but once the fantasy world and the real one collided, the use of a modern vocabulary in a fantasy setting annoyed me a lot. It resulted as cringy and irritating.
The world building felt extremely confusing, I couldn’t work the plot out, nor did I feel any sympathy for the protagonist, if not during the first chapter. Once she became a character of Times of Iron, she wasn’t surprised or bewildered by the situation, she accepted it without asking too many questions. I can totally understand that her desire to live allowed her not to doubt the bizarre situation, but it still felt too unreasonable.

However, Long Live Evil is an easy-to-read novel, with a lot of humour and it’s written from the villain’s point of view (that’s the main reason that made me request it in the first place) which made it appealing, but it simply wasn’t my cup of tea.

“Don’t listen to stories encouraging you to be good, telling you to shine in a filthy world and patiently endure suffering. Screw suffering. It’s too hard to be good. Do the easy thing. Do the evil thing. Grasp whatever you desire in your greedy bloodstained hands.”

Long Live Evil by Sarah Rees Brennan takes you on a wild ride where the villains take center stage and moral ambiguity reigns supreme. This novel promises a darkly thrilling experience, but how does it hold up?

I requested an ARC because the premise sounded perfect: a world where evil wins in the most entertaining ways. Unfortunately, the execution didn't quite match my expectations.

The beginning was a slog, with too much information introduced at once, leaving me confused and struggling to keep up. However, the pace improved in the middle, and as the world-building started to become clearer, I found myself more engaged.

This is a character-driven story with a slow-burning plot that unfolds unpredictably. The characters are delightfully unhinged, each one surprising me with their devious actions and twisted motivations. Despite this, the humor didn’t quite resonate with me; it had potential, but the delivery fell flat.

Despite these issues, the ending was a highlight. It was full of unexpected twists that kept me on the edge of my seat, ultimately redeeming the book.

Also, I'm Key's number one fan ;)

Thank you Netgalley for providing digital advanced copy in exchange for honest review.

Thank you to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for the eARC!

I couldn't wait to write this review since the moment I finished the book. It's one of the best novels of 2024, making Sarah Rees Brennan my new insta buy author. The story is incredible, arresting, and electrifying. It turns everything you know about fantasy book tropes on its head, and then some.

Have you ever wanted to be a character in your favorite book? Have you ever dreamed to be part of the story, romance the hero, fight the monsters, change the plot? The main character, Rae, she has a chance and things go very wrong.

The story starts on a sour note, with 20 year old Rae, dying. She gets a chance to fix if all if she gets a magical flower, then she gets cured and lives happily with her sister. The only thing she needs to do, is to go into her favorite fantasy novel and pick up that magical bloom. What could go wrong, it's so easy, she knows the plot, loves the emperor, it will be so much fun. We all would love such an opportunity.
As soon as we are in the story, it continues on a funnier side, always keeping you guessing what’s going to happen next, with quirky sarcastic commentary and snap replies, huge plot twists, and an ending to die for!

Now imagine that the simple, one dimensional stereotypical characters you know from your book, actually have a life, a personality, a back story that guides their actions, and changes what they do and why. Mostly their motivations are set by the original book, however through interactions with Rae, they change their way as they show free will, indicating to her that they are as real as the people in her world. What will you do when the character you thought you knew, takes an action they’re not supposed to? The plot gets thicker and changes, and every big twist reveals a different side to our cast.

<spoiler>An honorable king is a opportunistic creep, a modest warrior turns scholar betrays his king for a fool, an evil step sister sacrifices herself and her future for others, a gentle powerless heroine is actually plotting and manipulating, the debauchery lord is saving peasants in hiding.</spoiler>

Then the story changes again, and again, and then you finish it, realizing how wrong Rae was, how much she missed, misunderstood, skipped. The biggest reveals is spot on! The moment is captivating, the atmosphere and the consequence palpable.

I can’t wait for the second book. I need it, and I need it now. I want to know what happens to Rae and the Emperor.

One of my favorites of the year. Would love to see a tv adaptation. The world set up is incredible and the story could easily pull it off.

I received an e-arc and audioarc through Netgalley all opinions are my own.

One thing about me is that I love isekai. And this book did not disappoint. It was funny and gripping. I was on the edge my seat because I did not expect those plot twists!

I really enjoyed this book, and had a hard time putting it down.

The audiobook is good, but did confuse me at times. With the changing chapter povs. Also sometimes the narrator sounded a little off putting to me, but otherwise I still enjoyed the narration.

3 stars

This was a fun read, yet I didn't like the book.
The plot was kinda messy, and I didn't understand the goal for the main characters or even truly like them, eventho you shouldn't really because they're Villains, but still... you should enjoy reading about them(?).
Anyways, this was if anything was entertaining, so... 3 stars.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for the chance to read this book in exchange for an honest review.

I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

Long Live Evil is an entertaining adult fantasy in which the mc travels to a fictional world, a world that exists in a book series. It definitely delivers great one-liners and morally gray characters as well as villains and deeply misunderstood characters. I especially loved the indirect commentary on characters as it weaved a real reader's perspective into the narrative. The plot also delivered twists, some were predictable, others were unpredictable!

Overall, I enjoyed it, but at the same time, I didn't really feel pulled in. Rae was more scheming and one-liner deliverywoman than she was a villain, in my opinion. She is self-centered and selfish and schemes and manipulates, but I don't find these attributes especially villainous... She did treat some characters cruelly, though, and I found that to be her most villainous moment. I was really looking forward to this book but I just didn't vibe with it, I guess? It's very entertaining, though.

My favorite characters were the Cobra and Marius. They were interesting and mysterious. I always looked forward to their scenes. There might be some romance going on between them, too?! They have done some bad things, but their motivations and actions were intriguing! They raised the rating one whole star, too.

Maybe, I will reread it in the future because I do feel like I should like it more than I did. As it is now, I think Long Live Evil is an entertaining book that is very different from most other books. Entertaining but brutal and cruel in ways, too. For example, the book starts with Rae at the hospital and we see her struggle with her illness, so it's definitely NOT A LIGHT start. Also cw for murder, blood, decapitation, and cancer and terminal illnesses.

It's the monthly pick for an August box, and I have read that the edition will be beautiful. So to skip or not? I am not skipping because I did enjoy the book and I'm hoping for some pretty purple edges! It does have a special prose, so you will either love it or strongly dislike it. If I sound conflicted myself, it's because I am...

On a humane note, the author's acknowledgements were moving, and I am happy that she is feeling well and recovered from her illness. Knowing her story and thinking back to her book, everything in the story made sense, and it made me like it more. The author's heart while writing the book always comes through, as I usually say, and it shone here, too.

It was a surprising book. Exciting, mysterious and engaging.
The characters are very well constructed, as is the world. They are all part good and part bad, and I love how they evolve.
Recommended for those who have always dreamed of travelling to their favourite fantasy book and meeting the characters of that story that makes you dream.

An upside down romantasy that does not go where you think it's going

With its influences firmly on its sleeve, Long Live Evil is a portal fantasy that takes the point of view of a (minor) evil character: terminal cancer patient Rae is offered an unbelievable opportunity to escape her deathbed, a chance at life if she can achieve a quest in another world, a world that she and her younger sister Alice read every day. Uncertain but desperate, Rae takes a doubting step, and enters a Machiavellian king's court, ripe with gossiping ladies-in-waiting, chaste paladins, tricksy harlots, and zombies. Oh, and she's the pure heroine's evil stepsister.

I can see what Brennan is trying to do in this, taking the beloved tropes of epic fantasy and turning them on their heads to show that the motivation of so-called evil characters is as worthy of our readership. It joins a a long list of other books that do the same, some more successful than others, and this is a passing grade entry into a new series. With a fleshed out cast of characters ripped from every other fantasy novel, especially those with a slightly more meta take on the genre, this is an enjoyable if ultimately standard fantasy.

On the brink of death, Rae is offered the chance to enter the world of her favourite fantasy book series. She wakes up in a castle filled with scheming courtiers and an alluring emperor, to discover that she isn’t the heroine of the story, but the villain. Leaning in to all the tropes of villainy in fantasy fiction, Rae assembles a team of villains, determined to change their fate and let evil win for once.

This book was a lot of fun. All the fantasy tropes are present, but it’s not cliched because that’s kind of the point of the whole story. My favourite characters were the Cobra and Key – both were highly amusing and very well developed. I found Rae (or Rahela) quite irritating at times, but she was just a young woman living out her evil queen fantasy, so I also understood where she was coming from most of the time. What I couldn’t forgive was the how often she repeated herself and insisted on explaining her wicked plans to characters who would have no idea what in the world she was talking about. I assume the purpose of this was to let the reader know what was going on, but the detailed explanations were completely unnecessary. Authors, you need to trust your readers! We’re reading YOUR book, we should be able to follow what’s happening without having it spelled out!

The plot was a little bit weak at times, sometimes quite repetitive and lacking in progression. Overall I wouldn’t say this is a particularly good book, but I had a lot of fun reading it which is really all that matters! And I am very interested to see where the story goes in the next book.

Thank you NetGalley and the publisher for an e-ARC in exchange for my honest review!

"I scheme for power because I refuse to be powerless. I would break this whole world to get what I want."

An extremely entertaining and wild ride, this book had moments of poignant prose and absolutely ridiculous and almost cringey moments too. I felt like I was in a ludicrous fever dream half the time - in a good way. It made me laugh multiple times, as well as highlight a LOT of quotable parts. While I didn't always agree with the way Rae handled things once transported to the fantasy realm of her favourite book series, I did understand her motivations and I LOVED the romance subplots. Actually villainous characters abound, as well as a variety of morally ambiguous ones in varying shades of grey. A must-read for pure entertainment value.

I received an ARC from NetGalley.

I've been a fan of Brennan's writing since way back when, and I'll faithfully follow her through this and the next endeavor. There's a breezy quality to her style combined with a certain ability to hit an emotional note with poignancy that just gets to me, and there's a lot of it here. There's also a lot of emotion connected with the cancer storyline - Rue's experience is clearly inspired by Brennan's own, and these feelings come through, and hit hard.

But it just still didn't quite click for me. It's readable, and some parts are fun. Marius in particular has this mixture of meta humour, violence, and vulnerability of Brennan heroes that evoke emotion, and Eric's heartbreaking. But the humour, the drama and the feelings just never came together coherently. Humour is subjective, and this time, to me, the jokes fell flat. And the narration was overly explainy in a way that was not funny enough to justify the navel-gazing.

I mean, parts still shone! But what could be charming and lovely in Brennan's earlier original fiction, or surprisingly moving in her IP work, was just a little bit less so this time.

I'm still absolutely checking out the next volume, and I still read it cover to cover. It just wasn't as good, in my view, as much of SRB's earlier work - but I also saw it getting better and better in the course of the book, and I have hopes for the next one.

Review will be published on 25th July

Rae is a young woman dying from cancer who is offered the chance to enter the world of her favourite fantasy series and steal a flower that could save her life. She steps into the world only to find herself inhabiting the body of a villainess - a character who she knows will be executed the following day.

This is not a book about entering a story and trying not to change it. The first thing Rae has to do after entering the story world is to figure out how to change the story so she can stay alive. Instead, it's a book that explores the malleability of stories, how much can be changed and what will stay the same.

I was interested by the recurring question of 'who gets to count as real people?' When Rae enters the story world she is sure that other people dying doesn't matter, because those people aren't real. To the nobility, anyone without a title doesn't count, and this is reflected in how people are treated and how severely they're punished. To a certain charming but sociopathic assassin, no-one but himself seems really real (I do not know how realistic the portrayal is, but I was glad that the book did not treat him as inherently evil or beyond redemption despite his lack of empathy for others.) And to us as readers, there are two layers of unreality - the book and then the story within it, and we are at a nice safe distance from both of them.

I was also fascinated by the analysis of how women are forced to behave in sexist fantasy-land. The petty and destructive behaviour that results from simultaneously being in competition for marrying the king and prevented from marrying anyone else until he has made his decision. The heroine of the series is surrounded by men who are willing to lay down their lives for the sake of her goodness and beauty, but wouldn't she rather be able to save her own life? And Rae is in the body of a villainess, so she can't act like the angelic heroine and expect that to work. If she wants to save the lives of her friends, she'll have to figure out how to do it in a believably evil way.

The ending was a bit abrupt and I had trouble deciding if it was happy or not. You can never have a completely happy ending in a book where the protagonist has friends and loved ones in two different worlds, and mid-series in an epic fantasy series is not a particularly safe place to leave anyone. Ultimately I decided that whether the ending was happy depends on the stories that the readers decide to tell ourselves about what happens next - which is very fitting for a book about stories.

Recommended. A little dark, but with a strong sense of humour and some heart-warming moments to balance out the darkness and bloodshed.

This book was a DNF for me after 4 chapters.

I was not feeling this book. There was a lot of information and it felt like an overload. This could just be me though.

Reading some other reviews it does sound like the book gets better, and I do often stick it out with this hope but I just wasn't feeling this one

I was so taken by this book that I stayed up way past my bedtime to finish it. I was so eager (and stressed, I needed to know everyone was going to be okay) to see what was going to happen that I kind of wanted to skim-read the whole thing to get to the end, but at the same time I didn't want to miss a word. So I kind of ended up reading several parts multiple times, to make sure I didn't miss any detail.

I loved it. Loved the story, loved the characters, loved the pace. I can't even pick a favourite character, because all of them grew on me (maybe not the king😂). And Rae's (and the Cobra's) comments always made me laugh out loud. I loved all the references and inside jokes (especially things the Cobra said and Marius took literally). This is the story I always wanted to read! To be honest, I was a bit scared since I had high expectations for the morally grey characters in Assistant to the Villain, and I was disappointed. Here, however, they were absolutely perfect. Flawed characters always have that extra edge that makes them more real.

And I could keep going about this book forever, so I'm gonna stop here. I just want to mention a funny coincidence. In the acknowledgementa the author says the castle in this book was inspired by Castello Aragonese in Ischia. Well, I am travelling around Italy right now and I was in Ischia and saw the castle a few days after starting the book!

Anyway, I really hope there is another book because I really really need to know where this is going🥺 so many questions left open!

Thank you NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book.

DNF at 11%

I loved the idea of a book from the villainess' POV but I just could not get on with the tone of the book. I just really didn't enjoy any of the character interactions or the mindset of the main character. I think the author was aiming for whimsy but it just came across as juvenile to me. The main character is thrown into a fictional world from her sister's favourite book series but can't remember many of the details from the book other than the snippets she drops for the reader. It just feels a bit clunky and disjointed.

Maybe one to try again in the future but it's not one for now.

I wanted so much to love this book more than I did but it just wasn’t for me unfortunately. I pushed myself to 50% of the way through but there was a constant voice in my head asking if I was really enjoying it.
That said there were aspects that I enjoyed. The premise was fun and interesting and, as someone who always has more interest in the villain it was nice to see the story from the villians side. Although perhaps one of the things that makes the villain so intriguing is that we get the back story in glimpses and they remain mysterious in many ways.
All in all I would recommend this book to others as I think it definitely has an audience that will fully appreciate it. Unfortunately I was just not part of that.

Thank you to NetGalley and Little, Brown Book Group for the ARC

I loved it! Such a cool novel. The concept was incredibly interesting and unique, unlike anything I've ever read. And the execution was great as well. It was a magical world with great characters and drive all the time. Highly recommend

A solid one. Brennan writes engaging plot and her characters are interesting and slightly over-the-top. The prose is good, with vivid descriptions that bring the setting to life. Highly recommended for a captivating read.

This review is for Long Live Evil by Sarah Rees Brennan which releases in the UK on the 1st August! Thanks so much to Netgalley and Orbit/Little Brown Book Group for giving me an eArc copy for this book in exchange for my honest review.

This is the first book in Sarah’s first adult series, and I had a seriously good time. I loved the premise of seeing the story from the villains point of view and it did not disappoint.

To start, you find the main character is a very ill 20 year old woman who is getting closer to death. A mysterious woman appears and offers her something to save her life… she has to enter her favourite book series and gain the life saving flower that blooms once a year. Of course she agrees, but what the woman doesn’t tell her is that she is thrown into the body of the villain in the series… who is up for execution.

It’s fast paced, witty and like nothing I have read before. I couldn’t put it down and could not wait to see what happens to the characters in the story. There is such a wide variety of characters and they have such great development, with some having amazing arcs where they end up doing such unexpected things!

There was nothing I really disliked in this book, apart from sometimes the main character pissed me off. However, it did kinda add to the story as she’s a fairly unreliable narrator, and pretty morally grey for the most part of the book! It’s also hard to keep up with all the characters and their names sometimes. Especially at the beginning, I could get very confused.

I can’t wait to see what happens in the next instalment, especially after leaving us hanging on that cliffhanger!! Would happily recommend this to any fantasy readers out there.