ravensandpages's reviews
573 reviews

Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?

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. 

I received an ARC in exchange for an honest review. Thank you, NetGalley and Little Brown. 

When I read that a book is for fans of A Good Girl's Guide to Murder and Veronica Mars, I expect it to be a new and original story with echoes of a familiar story, not a series I already love condensed into one book with gay packaging... 

HOW TO FIND A MISSING GIRL was a disappointing read that follows Iris Blackthorn, an amateur detective who got her start when her sister Stella went missing a year ago. Unfortunately, her meddling ended up scaring off the only lead, and the police declared a sister a runaway before telling Iris to either back off or face jail time. Now she and her two friends run an under-the-table detective agency doing odd jobs like finding proof that Iris' ex-girlfriend Heather is being cheated on by school golden boy Nathan Devareaux, whose family has their small town in Louisiana in a choke hold; if you're not working for them, the only other viable career option is dealing drugs. 

But right after they hand the proof off, Heather disappears just like Stella did, right after dropping a new episode of her true crime podcast about Stella. But Iris is up against a ticking clock to find her; after she turns 18, any interference will land her in prison, and she only has a month to uncover the truth about what happened to Heather. 

This book was... not good. My praise for it centers almost solely around Sammy and Imani, who were pretty much the only characters that made the story bearable. I did like the queer rep (the funky earrings were so fun and accurate) and it's strangely nice to be getting old enough to read a book that feels like it's truly set in my time. I also did like the attention paid to Iris' grief about her sister disappearing and there were some moments that genuinely tugged at my heartstrings, especially with her dynamic with her aunt. However, the writing and pacing fell flat and had a lot of unnecessary repetition that Iris' random moments of quotable clarity could not save. The first half was a death crawl and the second half was hospital-worthy whiplash (said negatively), and to be entirely honest: Iris was a very irritating main character to be in the headspace of, and it made a very unenjoyable read.

To detail my complaints about her: she is far better at lying to and using the people around her than any detective work, which is pretty much the only explanation for her running an agency instead of going solo despite having zero talent for leadership or teamwork. So much of this book relied on coincidences and foolishness rather than actual detecting, to the point where the reveals were either too predictable or just out of nowhere. I found it truly hard to believe that Iris would have failed to draw the connections between Stella and Heather, and furthermore, the USB drives being the lynchpin pieces of evidence for the case got so infuriating. Their fixation on the recovery keys instead of stopping to think for two seconds about the password being something Iris would have had to know made everything that went into finding them mind-numbing to read. Which, of course, ended up being most of the book. While I get that teen detectives obviously aren't going to be Holmes or Poirot, I expect at least a slightly higher level of deduction if they're going to spend that much time waxing poetic about how it's what they're meant to do. The idea of her running out of time at 18 was also a bit laughable considering that it felt like the head detective made it really obvious she would be being tried as an adult if she got caught regardless, but that's just another thing on the list.

Beyond that, the book was also just a mash-up of every conceivable high school amateur detective story out there that did not put a unique enough twist on them to have something I could enjoy. And listen, as a very gay reader, I do love the draw of something I already love with queerness thrown in the mix! There's just a difference between adding tropes you already like to a new story you've crafted and being so close to one of your comp titles that my eyes start narrowing. Between the cold case missing sibling, and the podcast, and the room trashing, and the police interference, and the rich kid protected by their family, and the "my calling is hurting the people I love" breakdown, and the unsupportive parental figure, and the teachers... it just made me want to put this down and reread AGGGTM, but I had the audiobook accompanying me on a terrifying late-night drive in rural Missouri backroads and I wasn't about to risk my life turning it off, and that's what really got me through. 

I personally would not recommend this to fans of AGGGTM, as I think it would be a letdown. 

i’m very glad i was able to check this out before succumbing to the tiktok algorithm…