Title: Long Live Evil
Author: Sarah Rees Brennan
Published: 1st August 2024
Publisher: Orbit UK
Genre: Fantasy
Rating: 3.5/5 stars
A TALE FOR ANYONE WHO’S EVER FALLEN FOR THE VILLAIN…
When her whole life collapsed, Rae still had books. Dying, she seizes a second chance at living: a magical bargain that lets her enter the world of her favourite fantasy series.
She wakes in a castle on the edge of a hellish chasm, in a kingdom on the brink of war. Home to dangerous monsters, scheming courtiers and her favourite fictional character: the Once and Forever Emperor. He’s impossibly alluring, as only fiction can be. And in this fantasy world, she discovers she’s not the heroine, but the villainess in the Emperor’s tale.
So be it. The wicked are better dressed, with better one-liners, even if they’re doomed to bad ends. She assembles the wildly disparate villains of the story under her evil leadership, plotting to change their fate. But as the body count rises and the Emperor’s fury increases, it seems Rae and her allies may not survive to see the final page.
Waterstones
Thank you so much for reading my Book Review of Long Live Evil by Sarah Rees Brennan. I was lucky enough to be read an ARC copy from NetGalley, so thank you Orbit UK for that!
I was really intrigued by the premise of this novel. A bookworm who finds herself trapped inside her favourite book series is such a fun idea! Brennan really plays around with the tropes of fantasy novels which I loved, its a really playful take on the genre.
We meet our main character Rae as she is in hospital undergoing a gruelling cancer treatment. A content warning for in depth discussion of cancer and cancer treatment which could be difficult for some to read, and definitely took me by surprise. Brennan herself has been living with cancer recently, so it’s a very accurate portrayal but it was difficult to read at times.
Rae’s body is failing her, so she makes up for that by escaping to a fictional world, which she reads with her sister. I really loved the sisters aspect of this novel, Rae and Alice are a great portrayal of sisters, and Rae’s motivation to do anything for her sister was particularly accurate to me.
Brennan handled what could’ve been a tricky jump in the narrative very well. Rae is transplanted into the character of the villain and has to really think on her feet to figure out what to do. I liked that we kept a lot of Rae’s personality in the villain, she continues to speak in a modern way, which does throw the other characters off. Despite this, Rae does struggle with some aspects of the switch in worlds, which I also thought was quite accurate, no one would be able to just completely switch with no slip ups.
There is quite a few characters in the novel, and they’re all very well developed and written. It’s tricky to completely root for anyone which definitely makes it more fun. The evil characters have motivations and morals, and the good characters aren’t as good as they seem. This was done so well by Brennan, and was a fun way of really turning the fantasy tropes around.
One of the formatting elements of this novel I struggled with was perhaps just an unfinished copy problem and may be fixed. It was tricky to tell who was speaking at times, the line breaks meant I could see it was supposed to be someone else but there were no names or context in the writing itself. But even with this I still kept up with the majority of the dialogue.
The only other element I struggled with was that the novel felt a wee bit rushed and roughly plotted out. There seemed to be big gaps in the novel where more plot should’ve been, it just read very weirdly at times. It didn’t flow quite as well as I wanted it to which was a shame.
But overall I really enjoyed the novel. It was something very different to the usual fantasy novels I pick up. I loved that Brennan really played with the tropes of fantasy, and with the reader’s expectations so much! It was a fun and cheeky fantasy novel, and I hope there’s another book, it ended on a great cliffhanger!
Thank you so much for reading my book review of Long Live Evil. Huge thank you to Orbit UK for the proof eARC to read!
Pre-order Long Live Evil on Waterstones or Bookshop.org
