Long Live Evil by Sarah Rees BrennanMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
I haven't read anything by Sarah Rees Brennan in quite a while, in part because she went on a very long hiatus due to health problems in her life. Unsurprisingly, she works her personal experience with cancer into the story of this book, a sort of isekai where the protagonist, Rae, gets to go into the world of her favorite epic fantasy series, Time of Iron, and live her own version of the life of the villainess who seduces the evil young Emperor. Interestingly, the series - which combines elements of A Song of Ice and Fire and Throne of Glass and Fourth Wing - is officially published in universe by an anonymous author, which is itself some serious wish fulfillment I can get behind.
Naturally, the book leans very heavily into fantasy and romantasy tropes for satirical purposes - love triangles, sexual double standards, and prose that manages to combine florid overdescription with painfully modern humor - and also actually manages to make a perfectly strong case for why someone in Rae's shoes in particular might be drawn to enemies to lovers. (I still dislike enemies to lovers as a trend and trope, because it almost never works right for me, but props to Brennan for pulling it off on this one.) While there are some characters I didn't particularly care for - I ended up forgetting most of them outside Rae, her sister, the Emperor, and the Cobra; though Lord Faustinus in particular rubbed me the wrong way by being an extremely David Rose-level stereotype caricature - the Cobra is absolutely my favorite precisely because he's so chaotically Deadpool coded and warms my cold little bi boy heart.
I imagine there'll be much more surprises in store in the second book, judging from some of the interview's Brennan's given to promote this one...but you know what? If Brennan really wants to make a good satire of the current state of fantasy and fandom, the funniest thing she could do is to have the second book be the end of a duology, since that's another trend that I've found super annoying and ubiquitous over the years.
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