One Mike to Read Them All: “Long Live Evil” by Sarah Rees Brennan
This is the 3rd book I have read recently from the perspective of the villain - not antihero, not a book with no real heroes, but explicitly the villain. Protagonist, but still the villain of the story. Dreadful by Caitlin Rozakis was a farce; How to Become the Dark Lord & Die Trying by Django Wexler was a satire. This book was deadly serious.
Our main character is Rae. She’s 20 years old, and dying of leukemia. Her main comfort is her kid sister, and their mutual love of the “Time of Iron” book series. (As an aside, I’m curious to hear from someone who’s read both this and Sarah J. Maas. I haven’t read any of Maas’ stuff, but from what I know of it I suspect there was a lot of inspiration drawn from there. I also see a lot of Bella Swan in the book-in-a-book’s heroine Lia.) She’s visited at the hospital by a mysterious woman, who tells her that the doctors will soon tell her that her cancer has gotten worse, and her slight chance of survival has turned to no chance at all. But this woman offers an improbable chance; she will send her to the universe of the Time of Iron, and if she’s able to pluck a magical flower from the king’s greenhouses (an element of the books known to Rae) she will return to the real world and recover. Rae is suspicious, but naturally, but willing to take any chance. She finds herself in the cartoonishly-curvaceous body of the lascivious Lady Rahaela, also known as the Beauty Dipped in Blood, wicked stepsister to the good and pure heroine Lia, the night before Lady Rahaela is to be horribly executed at the end of the first book. But Rae is undaunted. She is determined, has nothing to lose, and knows how the story goes. She was put into the body of a villain, so a villain she shall be. Villains get to have more fun, after all.
Rae is a very angry person. She’s angry at her own body for failing her. She’s angry that she can’t be the protective older sister she used to be. She’s angry that her friends and boyfriend would complain about how hard her illness was on them until they abandoned her (and her best friend and ex boyfriend hooked up soon after). She’s angry at her dad for ditching the family soon after she was diagnosed, she’s angry at her mom whom she never sees because she is always working to pay Rae’s medical bills, she’s angry that she’s dying before she really got the chance to live. And now she’s dropped into the body of a villainess, with a fundamentally selfish (if entirely understandable) goal, in a world she considers fictional surrounded by people she doesn’t think of as real. So, yeah, she’s quite happy to be a villainess.
But things are not quite so simple, for lots of reasons. Her conviction that none of the people around her are real wears thin very quickly; she tries to tell herself it’s the case long after she should have realized otherwise. She doesn’t know the books as well as she thinks she does - she had a tendency to zone out during the “boring” parts. And in any case the Laws of Narrative Causality don’t hold as strongly as she thinks they do.
Leigh Burdago’s cover blurb called this “audacious,” and that’s a good word for it. I am looking forward to the sequel.
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