Sarah Rees Brennan does it again -- like her In Other Lands novel, this book takes us through the adventures of a small group of characters, two of whom are from our reality on Earth, and several of whom are citizens of a different land. Fish out of water fun begins.

Thank you to NetGalley and Orbit Books for providing this book, with my honest review below.

Long Live Evil has a premise that had me deeply intrigued and while I thought it delivered on that, the world it presented was a little too complicated for my tastes. Outside of Rae and Key the other characters were a little harder to track and the world quickly became similar to Game of Thrones. While I avoided that show because a lot was going on and you had to really commit to stay on top of it, I know many others adore it and I believe they would equally love this book. Clearly well written and kudos to the author for her creativity. While it’s not to my tastes I am rating it for what it is and its appeal to those who love a complex fantasy.

This is one of a series so while it’s absolutely a standalone as the first book, the ending is a cliffhanger so be prepared to read the other books in the series as they come out.

Rae is dying. She knows it and everyone around her knows it and one night when she takes a turn for the worst a woman approaches her hospital bed, a stranger that gives her an option to get her life back. All she has to do is enter a world and become the villain. And that's fine with her because she was never meant to be good anyway.

Rae is quite honestly one of the most vile, reprehensible character I have ever come across. Even before she gets Isekaied. She is so self absorbed, so fixated on herself that she actually believes she cares for people. Especially her sister, even as she admits to ignoring her constantly, as she purposely does things that she knows her cancer riddled body can't handle just to get her sister to feel bad for her she still spouts nonsense like she's the victim. She is the is farthest thing from a victim. If there was ever a character that didn't deserve to be isekaied Rae is it. But what makes her so much worse is that even as she is shown numerous times that what she is doing in the world she is Isekaied too is having horrible real life impacts she completes ignores it. To save herself. This isn't a good person having a villain moment this is a villain fulfilling her destiny. She's brilliantly well done. She is so infuriating so self centered, so lacking in self awareness, so fucking evil that there were times when I genuinely wanted to punch her in the face. And everyone around her loves her. Loves her. Truly desperately are willing to risk everything for this person who never considered them, not once. Until its too late of course.

The world building and the pacing are both exceptionally well done as well. The world's origin story is an integral part of the this tale and Brennan ensures that its simple enough for the reader to keep in the back of their minds while chaos unfolds around us. And she makes the answer so obvious throughout the book and it's just another nod to Rae's arrogance that the whole time you're just like "Come freaking on, for thirty seconds realize you aren't the smartest person in the room and look at what is staring at you!" Sorry see I hate her so much she keeps coming up.

So we'll talk about The Cobra and Lord Marius because if Rae made your blood boil these two were the adorable side characters who I want to live so very happily ever after. They are simply beautiful in a way two people who spend years circling around each other can be. I want a spin off.

The big question here though is; was this a good Isekai? And the answer is yes. Hell it's probably one of the best I've ever read/watched. I can genuinely only think of a handful that are better and quite frankly their names escape me at the moment. If this isn't turned into an anime there is no justice in the world.


Finally, I demand that this is all fixed in the next book. Damn it. Because reality is Rae really isn't evil, she just can't see her own worth, and she's been hurt so many times that it's not just that she can't put her trust in others it's that she can't even trust herself to put her trust in others. She deserves better. Key deserves better. I want this fixed or clearly on the road to fixed in book two.

Overall, of course I recommend this. I genuinely am not even sure how I'm going to live between now and book two. The real villainesse here is Brennan for leaving us on the most messed up cliffhanger in the history of books.

As always thanks for Orbit Books and NetGalley for the eArc!

I wanted to love this SO bad, but unfortunately ended up DNF'ing around 45%. The premise and beginning of the story was so fun, but I ended up finding myself confused with the characters since they all have regular names and nicknames. I also didn't understand the extra POV's and wish it would have just stuck to Rae.

I do think this will be popular, and will urge people to give it a try since it is such a fun premise!

Oh...my god. 😭

For all this is an adult novel, reading it actually made me spurn adulthood completely - first I stayed up very late the night I started reading it, then when I picked it back up on my lunch break the next day I just had to eventually acknowledge the fact that I was not going to get anymore work done until I finished it. And this is not a short book. I will forever associate that banger of an ending with lying on my bed as the sun gradually set and finishing the book intermittently weeping in darkness because I was not even going to get up and turn on the light. I was BUSY. I was in a whole other place.

Long Live Evil is a Sleeping Beauty forest of thorns and you will be entangled. There is so MUCH going on in here, with the surface-level breezy charm of Rae's slangy, relatably contemporary narration making it all the more devastating when you're hit with a depth of feeling so profound that you can only sit back and reckon with it before another line comes through to make you laugh out loud. [slaps the spine of this book] Yeah, you can fit the whole spectrum of the human experience in this baby.

I think what kills me most about Rae's narration in particular is the undercurrent of simmering anger we get occasional glimpses of, not just at the unfairness of her cancer diagnosis and the probability of dying young, but at the injustice of how she's treated over it and how alone it makes her feel. There were points where, although this isn't YA, I nevertheless wanted specifically teenage girls to read this book and internalize the messages in it: that you don't deserve to be treated poorly by the people you love, particularly when part of that poor treatment is being told that it's your job to forgive and be gracious to the people who treat you like shit and get off scot-free. That's so beautifully seen through by the overarching narrative here - when you're treated like the bad guy for expressing perfectly understandable anger over injustice, fuck it, right? Fine. Be the villain then. Sometimes when you're an angry girl fighting back people look at you and just see the fighting, so you might as well put your fists up. (And when they start to reduce you to just being the Dying Girl archetype fading into the background, well just look at the rest of them like they're fictional characters too. See how THEY like it.)

I don't read a lot of fantasy, so forgive my most relevant reference being Game of Thrones, but reading this felt like both consuming a series like that while simultaneously participating in the fandom for it. There is so much love in this book for the experience of being fannish and loving something outside of yourself with an intensity that frankly a lot of normies do not understand (to their detriment imo), and being invested in fiction and fictional characters and the experience of having Faves and Correct Opinions. One character in particular is the most adorable version of this, landing in this world and getting what could be the Mary Sue Experience but actually spending it being like, "No no, everyone still proceed accordingly with my ship. I would only like to observe from a respectful distance," which is again, wildly relatable. This is a book about loving books. This is a book about thinking you know what's going to happen in your life to the point that you sometimes forget you are a person with agency living in it and having unpredictable effects on the world around you. Honestly, low-key a good reminder.

I could keep giving book report here because I'm all excited about Themes (the first big battle scene is when you take trope-y man-riddled action cliches and improve them greatly by replacing all the men with women and it rules!!!) but let me spare you and just enthuse about my personal highlights, aka the things I have been haunted by day and night: the absolute box of bonbons selection of bad boys (the way I feel about Key is literally what this book is making a commentary on with how Rae feels about Octavian's character as a reader. and that is Fine), everything about the Golden Cobra and that origin story that did have me uhhhh crying a little, the casual Pit of Ghouls bordering the city, Lia my surprise beloved (dammit! she got me too!), Marius the cranky sad boy who is VERY dangerous and bad at feelings and somehow makes that all very adorable, the scene on the ROOF with the FIREWORKS oh my GOD you beautiful FOOLS please KISS on the MOUTH I'm going to have a meltdown, every time I personally whispered to Emer "pick up the axe. do axe things. you want to", the queerness the queerness the queerness, "They were in public! Villains were off the chain", and of course that KNOCKOUT of an ending (if I'm not supposed to be horny about it I fucked up! that's on me!).

I'm so glad this is a series and I look forward to thinking about this so much until the blessed day we get book two. Highly (obviously) recommended.

My thanks to Orbit Books and NetGalley for the ARC.

DNF during chapter 3 around 8% in. I was highly anticipating this arc but it was just a mess and I couldn’t bring myself to try any further. The pacing was way too fast, I wish we had taken a few chapter in the beginning to develop the world and the book series Rae goes into more because I was truly confused about the dynamics of the world we were in and who the Eyam characters were. The dialogue and narration were also abysmal at times. The exact line I decided to give up was: “The point is, I’m totally evil, and I want you to be my evil minions.” And with that, I refused to go any further. Thank you NetGalley and Orbit for the arc.

An isekai-inspired novel where our heroine/villainess is also processing the grief associated with being chronically ill? Yes, I'm 100% in.

Long Live Evil starts off in a way that feels almost like the Princess Bride. Rae has been hospital-bound with a terminal illness, she and her sister Alice read their favorite novel, Time of Iron, a sprawling fantasy full of intrigue, dastardly villains, beautiful love interests, and a god of an emperor. After a particularly rough period with illness, Rae meets a mysterious old woman and finds herself waking up in the world of Time of Iron as one of the villains and has to work to survive in the fictional world and her own.

We get heists, we get love stories, we get the inside scoop into how the "side characters" actually feel about all of the momentous events that they end up being swept up in. I want to avoid spoilers, but this book is a great romp through an incredible fantasy realm, while also expertly dealing with the emotional trauma that is having a chronic/terminal illness. I really appreciated how Sarah Rees Brennan was able to balance so much humor and fantastical elements while grounding Rae in reality and allowing her to process what is happening to her in the real world.

I will say that at times the pacing felt off with the events occurring and how some of the later parts of the book come together. However, I had a great time nonetheless and recommend this novel . Thank you so much to NetGalley and Orbit Books for the advanced copy of this book.

Thank you NetGalley and Orbit Books for giving me early access to this book! All opinions are my own.

I am literally in shock over this book. When I first started the book, it gave me similar vibes to a book I loved from the 90s called “Magic Kingdom for Sale/Sold!” I absolutely loved the premise of a down-on-their-luck character getting to escape real life into a fantasy world. But the added twist that she’s a villain was such a nice touch!

As I continued reading the book, I fell more and more in love with it. The way Rae sees the world felt so unique; it shouldn’t have surprised me to learn that the author went through a similar cancer experience and this book was written afterwards, which explains why her trials felt so real. And the twist at the end!!! I just…speechless.

Absolutely pick up this book if you are a fan of fantasy, particularly if you like all the usual fantasy tropes but with great spins on them!

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

I had a really fun time reading this book! The banter between the main characters kept me hooked from beginning to end. This element made their chemistry feel even more genuine and hade me rooting for their happily-ever-after ending. The world is also very unique and reminds me a lot of manhwas I have read in the past, where an every-day girl gets transported to her favorite fictional world and becomes the villainess. I have never read a book based on this trope, but it was splendidly done! I would highly recommend this read to anyone who loves those types of manhwas, or is just looking for a fun romantic fantasy.

4.5 stars

god this is going to give me the same book hangover as dark rise/dark heir and who knows how long i'll have to wait for the next book!! (provided there will be another)

very much enjoyed all the characters and the isekai element was great and incredibly fun. key is definitely my favorite character and i just want the best for him truly.

anyways i thoroughly enjoyed this and as always thank you to Netgalley for the ARC!

Special thanks to NetGalley and Orbit for providing me with an e-arc in exchange for an honest review. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

Thoughts
If Assistant to the Villain and Jodi Picoult's Between the Lines birthed a 20 year old baby, this would be this book. This was quite literally the most bananas thing that I have read all year. It made me laugh, it made me cringe, it made me bewildered & scratch my head about what the hell was going on in the plot. This was very campy and kind of all over the place & is a multi-pov story.

Do I recommend this? Kind of 😹😹 Read the first few chapters & see if you like the writing.

Long live evil indeed! I am loving the trend of villain protagonists. Rae was such a fun character and I loved all of her scheming. The supporting characters all were so fun and interesting I wanted all of their “tragic backstories.” The Golden Cobra was my favorite. I love how he understands Rae and how she does not see the characters as real. found some of the plot somewhat predictable and there were certainly some pacing issues, but i just had so much fun that I didn’t care. The twist at the end blew my mind. I’m excited to continue and see where the story goes.

An audacious and warmhearted book that looks to strike an impossible balance and comes about as close as I could ask for. This is a fascinating have-your-cake-and-eat-it story that wants to comment and immerse at once, to sweep you off into a tale of high drama and tell you that high drama can't be fully real. I felt it stumbled mostly in the length and depth of characters (something that is almost always at odds with that sarcastic, commenting tone the novel revels in). The ending finally gets where I wish it had been from the halfway mark and even before that, Rae and the voice carried me through. I'll definitely read the next one.

Thank you to Orbit and Sarah Rees Brennan for this ARC

I initially selected this book because I remember reading the Mortal Instruments novellas by SRB and I wanted to see what she was up to. The title font and color did make me think that this would be a silly, shorter book, but I was pleasantly surprised.

Overall, I really enjoyed reading this!! It was MUCH longer than I was expecting (in a good way). The pacing and meta-analysis of book fandoms were some of the many high points.

I love the villain / morally-grey focused characterization and seeing them interact with the "heroes." It's really not a POV that you get to see as much in the usual adult fantasy-romance for more than a chapter. It also broke down a lot of usual tropes, such as the damsel in distress, the ultra-bitchy and feminine female characters who bully the heroine, etc.

There is a lot of modern slang used, but notably only by the MC and another character who it makes sense for. Some may think it's cringe or dated or whatever, I personally thought it was great. Even if I reread this 20 years later, I think it'd be funny. The slang makes the heroine's beliefs about the realness of the world, also seem more real. It also helps this come back from being a dark book.

The names of rooms, magical objects, and character titles do sound heavy handed (the room of bone and blood, the lady of fire and snow (I can't totally remember these), for example). However, I F E E L like this was intentional. It also reminds me of how a LOT of modern fantasy series' titles use the naming convention, "The X of Y and Z." The naming conventions fit the world.

The descriptions of the MC's illness hit even harder once you learn that the author had late-stage cancer; it adds an understandable gravity to a lot of the MC's attitudes and actions.

The weakest point was the beginning before Rae goes into the book series. There was a lot of telling rather than showing. We are told that the mom works very hard but is absent a lot of the time- something like this could be shown without introducing a whole character by a phone call between Rae and her mom. There are some sentences discussing Rae's opinions on various topics that could be cut down as well.

Alice comes across as petty at certain points. I think if my sibling had cancer, I wouldn't be upset with them for forgetting or not paying close enough attention to a book series.

I will be sure to keep an eye out for the next book in this series! I really think this will do well when it releases.

My thanks to Netgalley and Orbit Books for providing me with a digital copy for review.

I really liked the premise of this and liked Rae, the main character. However, the story felt all over the place, the secondary characters were not distinctive enough for me to differentiate between them, and the writing constantly took me out of the story. After the 56 percent mark I ended up skimming because I was curious enough to know how it ended but wasn’t invested enough to continue reading the rest of it. I think this book will land for some people, but unfortunately it did not for me.

A brilliant mess

The publisher's blurb for Sarah Rees Brennan's Long Live Evil makes it sound like a funny book about a real-world character who slips into a book and finds herself the villain. And it IS that! There were many laugh-out-loud moments, such as this one

"Books often described kisses as ‘searing’ which made Rae think of salmon, but characters seemed to enjoy the seared-salmon kisses."*

or this

'“You saw this horse born,” Marius reminded ... “I told you his bloodline could find their way anywhere. You named him.” “That was a joke,” ... Marius didn’t see what was humorous. He’d thought it was a nice name. ... “So this is my noble steed, Google Maps?”'*

Rae, our heroine/villainess, is a fantasy book lover, who knows all the plot tropes, not to mention the movies and songs. Plugged into a fantasy novel (à la Inkworld or Thursday Next -- both are referenced in the Acknowledgments) Rae reacts like the thoroughly modern young woman she is, with sense and never-ending incongruity. It never gets old, or at least it did not for me.

But there's another side to this that the blurb barely hints at. Rae, when we meet her, is dying of cancer. There's a lot of pain and anger in her -- there's a reason why, when she's plugged into her sister's favorite fantasy series, she is the villain. Brennan is herself a late-stage cancer survivor. When she writes,

"A neighbour had taken Rae aside when news of her diagnosis spread, counselling her to take a blanket to her first appointment. Rae didn’t understand until she found herself on a reclined chair having chemo, every warm organ in her body turning to frozen grapes. She clutched her blanket as the last rope to a warmer world. When she got home, she plunged into a scalding hot bath, but once you knew such cold existed it was impossible to ever really be warm again."*

it's obvious she knows what she's talking about.

So, there you have Long Live Evil. It's one laugh after another, and also a portrait of gut-wrenching pain and loneliness. A brilliant mess. It won't be for everyone. But I loved it.

Thanks to NetGalley and Orbit for an advance reader copy of Long Live Evil. Release date 30-Jul-2024.

*Quotes are from an advance reader copy and may change before publication. This review will be corrected on the release date if necessary.

THIS WAS GOOD. the twists, the FREAKING PLOT TWIST had me so good, i had to reread the end in SHOCK (had me like this🫢)

if you have love webtoon, specifically isekai’d genre. YOU WOULD EAT THIS UP.

I wish i could say more but Rae is my favorite character. like the duality of her morality and the character development is so good!!!

the mere fact that it’s about villians made me so excited to read. the read and plot AND the story setttibg was just as good.

Such a fun concept and story. Really enjoyed the snarky MC and all of the magic along the way, even if the ending wasn't exactly happily ever after--I loved it.

Long Live Evil by Sarah Rees Brennan is the latest early book review I received from Net Galley. This book is about a young woman named Rae thats dying. When a mysterious woman gives her the chance to go into her favorite book, find a flower that can cure her and come back, she takes the chance. Then she becomes a villain in order to reach her goal!

Like the previous book I <a href="https://roland19.wordpress.com/2024/02/13/how-to-become-the-dark-lord-and-die-trying-review/" data-type="page" data-id="2">reviewed</a>, How to Become A Dark Lord and Die Trying, Rae takes on the villain role and also says stuff about our modern society that many of the characters in the book don't understand. Other than that, the two books are very different. Long Live Evil does have some humor but its character only has one chance to get everything right. And of course everything goes horribly wrong. Rae is surrounded by villains, even the heroes seem like villains! Its an impossible task that Rae must accomplish.

The story has a lot of twists and turns. It feels like an epic book along the lines of high fantasy, while keeping a sense of humor and never losing its focus on its characters. We not only get Rae's point of view, but we also find out what a few of the other characters are thinking too. It never gets confusing and always adds to the plot and getting away from Rae's pov makes us wonder at times just what she knows and if she will accomplish her goal or not.

Sarah Rees Brennan is a really good writer and does a wonderful job of making you feel like you are in this fantasy world while also delivering dialogue thats not too funny nor over dramatic. Long Live Evil has the perfect balance between satire and epic fantasy. She also does a good job of making you wonder who the real villains of the story are. I have to admit though, I did see the story's final twist coming but there were so many teases and hints throughout the story. Its really well done.

Long Live Evil is an excellent book. Its also the first book in a series, so the book doesn't end. It leaves a cliffhanger and you'll be left wanting more. I can't wait to read the next book in this series.

Thank you to Orbit Books and Net Galley for letting me read this book early. Long Live Evil comes out on July 30, 2024.

Thank you to NetGalley and Orbit for providing a digital ARC in exchange for an honest review. In Long Live Evil by Sarah Rees Brennan, a bargain with a stranger sends Rae from dying of brain cancer to waking up in the world of her favorite novel, with a chance to cure herself and return to her own world if she can retrieve the Flower of Life and Death when it blooms. The catch? Rae has woken up in the body of Lady Rahela, a minor villain who will be executed the next day. Also? Rae doesn’t actually remember much about the events of the first book in the series, which is unhelpful as she tries to survive those early plot developments long enough to seize her way home. Distrusted by the heroes and heroine, Rae seizes on the other villains of the story, bringing them together to keep herself alive and try to prevent some of the future tragedies she knows will come. But every change she makes seems to send the story further off course and may doom both Rae and her favorite characters.

I struggled a little with the beginning of the book because I was having trouble settling into the narration style. Once Rae finds herself in Lady Rahela’s body, I was hooked. I loved the characters, the banter, the unreliable narration (both because Rae doesn’t remember the events of the book as well as she might wish and because her “knowledge” of what’s coming clouds her interpretations of events), and the sheer unhinged hilarity of certain scenes. The book feels far more about the characters and their relationships than the advancement of the plot, which is very much my jam. Brennan is playing with character tropes and roles, digging into character, storytelling, who gets to tell their stories and how, and what makes a villain or a hero, which is fantastic. On top of all of this, the book is just fun. By the end, I was fully invested in the characters, and was sad to leave them behind when I reached the last page. At first I wasn’t sure how I felt about how the book ended, because I thought this was a standalone novel and it felt like there was so much left to learn about these characters and this world, but it looks like this is the first book in a series, so I am very much looking forward to any sequels.