Genres: Fantasy, High Fantasy, Portal Fantasy, New Adult
Representation: Sapphic POV character, secondary bisexual brown/Black character, secondary F/F
Protagonist Age: 20
PoV: Third-person, past-tense; multiple PoVs
Published on: 30th July 2024; 1st August 2024; 27th August 2024
ISBN: B0CD3Q6P4C
Goodreads
This adult epic fantasy debut from Sarah Rees Brennan puts the reader in the villain's shoes, for an adventure that is both "brilliant" (Holly Black) and "supremely satisfying" (Leigh Bardugo). Expect a rogue's gallery of villains including an axe wielding maid, a shining knight with dark moods, a homicidal bodyguard, and a playboy spymaster with a golden heart and a filthy reputation.
When her whole life collapsed, Rae still had books. Dying, she seizes a second chance at a magical bargain that lets her enter the world of her favorite 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.
THIS IS A TALE FOR EVERYONE WHO’S EVER FALLEN FOR THE VILLAIN…
I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.
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 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 View Spoiler » !!!
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.
Trigger warnings: View Spoiler »
I keep hearing amazing things about this book! It looks like I need to read this book A.S.A.P.!!!
I strongly encourage you to do so!
Soooo good to hear. This is next on my review pile!
Excellent!