A TALE FOR EVERYONE 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.
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.
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I received a copy of this book from NetGalley. All thoughts are my own.
Review:
I will fully admit I had no hopes for this book going in. The summary is the exact type of cringe that straddles the line between ‘brilliant’ and ‘terrible’ and frankly, and I had no faith it would be the former. Still, I’ve grown up reading translated Asian isekai stories and I was really curious how a Western take on it would go. It almost didn’t.
Long Live Evil is a Western take on Eastern Villainess Isekai genre. For those unfamiliar, isekai (JP) (or isegye (KR)/chuanyue (CN)/transmigration) is a genre where a character finds themselves in the body of someone else and has to deal with the consequences. Oftentimes, they end up in the body of a fictional character and are either perma-stuck there or have to complete some objective to get out. As the name suggests, in villainess isekais the MC gets stuck in the body of the ‘villainess’ of a story, a character competing with the heroine the main love interest’s hand and have to figure out how to navigate themselves out of said position. Occasionally, this comes with constraints of being unable to act ‘Out Of Character’ (OOC). Now onto the story itself.
The first 10% of this book is DNF-ably bad. My god was it hard to read. The main character, Rae, embraces her villainess-era lifestyle with an uncomfortable gung-ho, dropping every villain-aesthetic cringe one-liner known to man. Every vaguely villain-sequence symbolism is embellished. I’ve seen someone on Goodreads describe it as the Taylor Swift-esque Repuation-era villainism and that’s uncomfortably spot on. I wouldn’t fault anyone for reading that first 10%, closing the book, and never opening it again for just how off-putting it was.
However, I told myself I would make it to at least 25% before calling it quits and I can’t tell if I love or hate myself for that. Around the 20% mark, we’re introduced to the best (and probably only tolerable) character of the entire book, the Golden Cobra. Who’s secretly, gasp, another transmigrator! He’s got this deliciously tortured love-hate enemies-but-not-really relationship with the world’s most Lan Wangji-coded character in Marius and it makes you want to scream ‘just kiss already!’. Really it was their antics and Marius’ “progressive for my time because I think women are capable of independent thought” mentality that really really carried this book and tempered Rae’s absolute insufferability.
I will give credit where credit is due. Sarah Rees Brennan, for all her faults of writing terrible POV characters, knows her craft. The plot of Long Live Evil is genuinely good. The story itself is incredibly compelling if you just kind of ignore Rae’s bullshit and the twists and turns it pulls you through as a Western take on the Isekai genre is shockingly well written. Brennan does humor really well and I found myself laughing quite a bit. Of course, then there’s moments like the musical chapter that I just had to skip entirely for my own sanity, but you win some you lose some.
Really, my only other complaint about this book and a warning to anyone else considering picking it up is that despite its cover, no one is actually a villain. Not even in a tongue-in-cheek manner. This is one of those, actually villains are just misunderstood people who have been demonized by people in power. And occasionally we like to wear blood red and brandish a knife around. I’m sorry. That’s boring as fuck. Let characters actually be evil!! Don’t be a coward!!!!!! Again, strong parallels to the Taylor Swift Reputation villain era of villainry
Overall, I rate a this book a 3.5/5. It would have been a 2 without Cobra, but also I would have DNFed without Cobra. The book is exactly what it says on the cover and this will be very much a love it or hate it novel.
r/Fantasy 2023-24 Bingo Squares:
- First in a series
Publication Date: 27 August 2024
Publisher: Orbit Books
Format: eBook, ARC
Pages: 435
Word Count:
ISBN: 9780316568715
Buy It Here: Amazon | Google Books | Barnes & Noble | Goodreads