I was sent an ARC in exchange for an honest review. Thank you, NetGalley and Orbit.

LONG LIVE EVIL is built on a fantasy reader's dream: for one more shot at life, Rae must enter the pages of her favorite fantasy series, battle against her fictional crush, and pull off enough schemes to get to the mystical Flower of Life and Death on the one night a year it blooms. The only problem? She's dropped in as Lady Rahela, the heroine's evil stepsister, on the night before her execution and must prolong that fated death by any means necessary despite never having finished the first book. By gathering wicked allies and selling herself as indisposable, Rae intends to pull any wicked trick she has in order to get what she wants and make sure the story goes how she wants it to, including getting her favorite ship together. 

I'll start with what I did like about this book, which is that it had a good foundation and I was invested in the cast! Key, Marius, and the Cobra were far and away my favorites, and the relationship between Marius and the Cobra and then Key's devotion to Rae? I was devouring it. I did also love Emer's POV (though I wish her romance with Lia was a bit messier and torrid, it ended up feeling so sticky soft-sweet in comparison to what Marius and the Cobra obviously have and I refuse to believe they don't). Despite what is about to follow, I think the book still has a compulsive readability to it, and if there are any sequels—I believe there are, after that ending??—I will still be in line to pick them up. 

That being said. The book was not what I wanted it to be and it wasn't able to convince me that what it was doing was better. LONG LIVE EVIL is more often than not a comedy before a fantasy, and I didn't always find it amusing enough to justify a lack of engaging, sensical worldbuilding in the fantasy story Rae enters. There are a lot of tongue-in-cheek "noun of noun and noun" references, which I did chuckle at the first few times, but it was an energy that was sustained long past the point of making sense. The story really seemed to struggle between trying to be funny or irreverent and trying to be clever and profound, but I think it was slightly too self-aware to strike the correct balance and left me feeling unable to make the final leap of getting properly invested and attached to the series-in-a-series. Furthermore, I really found the cleverness wanting and would have really loved to see the idea of evil and feminine places in stories approached with depth and nuance rather than the beginning of a conversation that feminist spaces & writing have already been having and addressing for years now. 

I can, at the very least, assign some of my disappointment to a strong caveat, being that I have been a lover of portal fantasies, isekai, and female-led isekai basically my entire life. I have seen some of the best and a lot of the mediocre, and on the other hand, I've also seen some of the best and a lot of the mediocre when it comes to addressing genre issues and putting spins on genre-specific tropes. So now a lot of my desire when it comes to new entries is that I need something truly clever and different, and if the title of your book is LONG LIVE EVIL, I'm at least hoping for an actually evil main character (I support women's wrongs!) who supports the evil hero (which I have Things To Say About but I'll save it for now) or a far deeper dive into the roles characters are assigned which then reflect the roles we as people are assigned in our society. Stepping back, I think I wanted something far more serious and intentional, like feeling like Rae was stepping into a more understandably world-famous series akin to GOT or Wheel of Time. Though it certainly would have been more work, I feel the discussions being had in the book would have been far stronger with a more purposefully designed in-book world instead of a world that amounted to a few jokes and Tumblr posts in a high fantasy trenchcoat. 

My final note is that the writing felt strangely unpolished compared to other ARCs I've received, but I do think this is something that can be cleared up with a few rounds of edits. There was a lot of repetition and clumsily crafted metaphors, and Rae's ignorance of the books could have been tweaked just a bit to lend the plot twist way more punch. I also felt that the "excerpts" in the beginning of the chapters could have done far more to worldbuild and reveal info about characters to avoid the infodumping & monologues that set the pacing back more than once. There are aspects of LONG LIVE EVIL that could be something, but I think it kept drawing back into something shallow and palatable rather than taking the leap to be something unique. I am looking forward to see if the sequels will lean into that (again! especially with that ending!!) or be more of the same.