scijessreads

Sometimes, the villains have more fun. And Sarah Rees Brennan’s Long Live Evil is a fun exploration of embracing the evil, scheming side… until things go a little off plan. No evil scheme is perfect, after all.

Summary: 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.

Review: What would you do if you ended up in your favorite fantasy book world, but as the villain and not the heroine? If you’re Rae, embrace evil, scheme for your survival, and acquire a band of villainous hench-people, of course! However, Rae quickly finds out that the world she thought she knew isn’t quite what she remembers from the stories her sister read to her. And her only way out of the world of the books is to pull off a very villainous scheme. While not changing the story… too much.

Long Live Evil is a wicked romp full of characters we all know, twists we should all see coming, and a delightful skewer of genre staples that we have all come to embrace. It also lets us see that even evil can have moments of moral quandary and that maybe it is better to pay closer attention when someone is telling you something, lest you forget an important piece of information that will later come back to bite you.

From the end, we can hopefully expect more from this world, as it is wide open for evil to have a redemption arc. And for some new heroes to come out of the supporting characters. Maybe.

I read this early as an ARC from NetGalley and the publisher, Orbit Books. Publication date is August 27th. All opinions are my own.