REVIEW: Long Live Evil by Sarah Rees Brennan
In Long Live Evil by Sarah Rees Brennan, Rae lays in a hospital bed, dying of cancer. Her sister Alice is reading from her (read: “their”) favourite book, A Time of Iron. Rae can barely focus on the story, keeps forgetting the characters and the plot, annoying the hell out of Alice. But this book and story matter so much to Alice, and while Rae may be running out of time and things she wants to spend that time on, listening to her sister read the story one last time is one of the last things she wants. And then a mysterious woman appears at her bedside and tells her she is going to die, but slowly, wasting away everything her family has in the coming months as she withers to nothing herself. Unless she enters the the Time of Iron dark romantasy world and somehow survives the story as the evil sister—who is rather inconveniently meant to die tomorrow.
Long Live Evil is told through the eyes of Rae–somebody who has watched the people around her abandon and start to dislike her as her cancer took hold of her body–as she gets pulled into a world where nobody is real. Nobody is a human being she has to care about, and she treats them just so–as pawns to be manipulated into getting her what she needs to get back to her life: the Flower of Living and Dying. She’s easily the star of the show of the three points of view, and I think she’s a character that grimdark fans are likely to enjoy for her callous disregard and manipulation of those around her and the way she changes over the course of the books. Her relationship with Key was a very interesting read and kept me glued to the pages.
The second point of view, Marius, was an interesting take on the stoic, vow-restrained bad arse character with a tragic backstory and a merciless heart—yet somehow a hero. I started out quite liking this take on a hero, almost a little bit Ned Stark-y in the way that the world is so black and white in his eyes and damn the consequences of him ensuring the right things happen around him. However, his relationship and history with the Golden Cobra and its evolution across the book just never landed for me at all, which kind of put a kink in my enjoyment of the book, because it’s an important relationship.
Emer was a bit of a wet blanket of a character for me. I’m not entirely sure on her purpose as a PoV versus a secondary character, apart from reminding us that Rae is evil, but I don’t feel she had much impact or purpose in her role as Emer, or The Iron Maid. I don’t often struggle to retain interest in a POV character, not since some of the characters in A Song of Ice and Fire, but I kept having to stop myself from skipping sentences and paragraphs because I just wanted to find something I could latch on to and care about.
Throughout Long Live Evil we watch Rae use everything and everyone to try to get back to the life she wants. She tries to manipulate her supporters (such as The Golden Cobra, one of her fellow villains), misdirect her enemies (such as King Octavianus, the hero of A Time of Iron), and survive the constant threat of being executed and thrown into the ravine (by somebody like Marius). All the while she needs to try and remember what her character Raheala did in the books before she arrived to take over Rahaela’s body / character, and how what Rae does changes the storyline and timelines she uses to pretend to be a prophet so that she’s not executed. King Octavianus remains the constant threat to Rae, his power making him all but unassailable, and his necessity to the plot for future books making him irremovable. He creates an ongoing feeling of dread for Rae, and a big bad for the story, a nice flip on all the tropes and standards stacked tall that would normally make him the hero of the book with all his horrors forgiven because of the death of his beloved and perfect Lia.
One of the key themes in this book is what cancer does to you when you are the person struggling through it. When you’re watching the world move on around you while you wilt. Seeing your friends and family start coming in less and less. Maybe even having them care less and less, and perhaps even them wanting it to be over so they can go back to their normal lives. Cancer, in any one of its many forms, has wiped out a significant part of my father’s wider family, and my mother-in-law. While I haven’t experienced its horrible touch personally, I have born witness to what it, and its treatment, does to those you love. The internal commentary on loneliness and abandonment, and the decrepifying of your body around your screaming mind, just hammered itself home. When I opened this book based on naught but a cool title and cover, I had no idea how much impact this part of the book would have on me as I sat there asking myself if I’d done enough, from the perspective of those gone from my own life (and in some fortunate cases, those still here). Reading the author’s note at the end, and realising this was lived experience, explained why it hit so hard. I am glad the author is still around and thriving, and that they received the support they needed to be able to write Long Live Evil.
Overall, I had very middling feelings about Long Live Evil. On the one hand, the cancer aspects of the book really hit home, almost bringing me to tears at times. I also mostly enjoyed the kind of piss-take nature / breaching the forth wall feeling of how we viewed the story through Rae’s eyes. It has a very similar feel to the book I reviewed earlier this year (How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying by Django Wexler), but is a lot more cynical, due to the underlying nature of the cancer backstory. On the other hand, it also meant the big moments in the fantasy setting didn’t hit the mark like I want when reading a fantasy novel—which, I think, was kind of the point intended by the author, it just didn’t land for what I enjoy reading.
While I did enjoy some of the forth wall breaking style of delivery, the whole approach of viewing this story through the eyes of somebody who remembered most of the plot, but not all of it, then was living it, manipulating it, purposefully and then inadvertently changing it, then having other characters know what she knew, just became quite confusing for me at times, and hard to buy in to at others. I had to take my suspension of disbelief and stretch it to its absolute limit.
Overall, I’m glad I read Long Live Evil for its horrific undertone and the way the author’s lived experience shaped Rae’s character. I recommend this book as a read worth experiencing, I don’t think I’d pick up a book 2 to find out what happens next. I’ll probably ask Emma, who really enjoyed the first book, to review that one!
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