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So, my library eloan of Long Live Evil came through
A note to anybody who wants to read this: I get the impression that we're supposed to think that the "original" book was written with prose so purple it might as well have been in grape-scented marker. The effect can be a little much, but hey, at least nobody gazes outward with a glint in their silvery orbs, limpid, lambent, or otherwise! But yeah, if you aren't able to get into it within a chapter or two, that's not going to improve itself.
I liked it, but to be fair, I like most things I read.
Oh, one more warning - somebody at Goodreads was going on about the fact that the author either misunderstood or willfully misused the term "Ladies in Waiting" for this book. I don't quite agree that it's something to get so annoyed about, but we've all got our thing. I don't like books which have potatoes in pre-Columbian Europe (or not!Europe). You'll all be pleased to note that I observed no potatoes in this book.
So, our protagonist is dying of cancer and gets the last minute chance to enter the world of her favorite book series in the hopes of finding the precious flower that will save her IRL life. Once she's there we're going to meet one other person from Earth, and his foster mother in this world said that her deceased husband came from Berlin, so the question asks itself: How many people have been shuttled into this world from our world? And are all the immigrants from the same Earth? Because Rae remembers the book very differently from how the Cobra does - specifically, she remembers that he exists and is a big part of the plot, whereas he knows for damn sure that when he arrived in the book he was a nameless thief who only existed to die to promote either the setting or the plot. (He hadn't intended to take over so much of the plot for himself. Whoops.)
Anyway, Rae shows up before her character's big execution, and sees that the only way out is to use her knowledge of the books to pretend to be a seer. Which would probably be a better plan if she'd ever actually read the first book, but she didn't. Her sister read it to her, but as she was busy having chemo and dying of cancer at the time, very little of it stuck and she's confused about a few things.
She's also not very smart. I hate to say, but it's true. She's constantly making decisions based on her beliefs about how the story is supposed to go and who the characters are supposed to be. She's constantly being shown that she doesn't understand any of these people even a little. She revises her individual opinions of people a little bit, but never actually examines her central belief that she knows how the story goes. Even at the end of the book where it's revealed that she forgot who her favorite character was her big worry is that she screwed up by not spending enough time matchmaking him with her character's stepsister, who is a perfect saintly angel who might have helped his moral compass a little.
1. In the books, he fell for this girl and then after she died he saved her corpse and made people kiss her dead feet. Ew.
2. A few chapters earlier, Rae had finally figured out that her sweet, doelike stepsister is actually as cool and calculating as they come, she just hides it really well. (Is this how the girl was always written, or is that some hotly-debated fantheory? Rae does not ask this question. I think probably she ought to.)
3. Her stepsister is in love with the maid. It's very sweet. You can't blame Rae for not picking up on that, though, first because everybody in this book is amazingly oblivious to everybody's feelings, including their own, but also because the stepsister and the maid are really good at hiding their thoughts, feelings, and motivations from the world. Really, they're perfect for each other.
4. Other people who are oblivious to other people's feelings include Rae and her servant (well, he's not oblivious to his own feelings and neither is the maid, but Rae just will not recognize it even if somebody explained it to her with a powerpoint and a side of interpretive dance), Rae and the Cobra with regards to Marius being absolutely besotted with the Cobra (Marius is also oblivious, but to be fair, he doesn't know that being gay is an option), literally everybody with regards to the love affair between the foreign princess and the charmingly bisexual man whose name escapes me (sidenote: his family is amazing and shame on Rae for initially writing his twin sisters off as being exceedingly minor catty side characters), Rae and the Cobra with regards towards Lia's feelings towards men in general, and... listen, people just don't get people in this book. Or maybe it's a Rae-and-Cobra special.
So, yeah, there's a lot of feelings in this book. This is just as well, because the "original" plot and worldbuilding is pretty shaky, so it clearly only became a sensation for other reasons. Anyway, I got remarkably invested and may read it again before I return it to the library. Because with a long waitlist, returning early is the polite thing to do.
I liked it, but to be fair, I like most things I read.
Oh, one more warning - somebody at Goodreads was going on about the fact that the author either misunderstood or willfully misused the term "Ladies in Waiting" for this book. I don't quite agree that it's something to get so annoyed about, but we've all got our thing. I don't like books which have potatoes in pre-Columbian Europe (or not!Europe). You'll all be pleased to note that I observed no potatoes in this book.
So, our protagonist is dying of cancer and gets the last minute chance to enter the world of her favorite book series in the hopes of finding the precious flower that will save her IRL life. Once she's there we're going to meet one other person from Earth, and his foster mother in this world said that her deceased husband came from Berlin, so the question asks itself: How many people have been shuttled into this world from our world? And are all the immigrants from the same Earth? Because Rae remembers the book very differently from how the Cobra does - specifically, she remembers that he exists and is a big part of the plot, whereas he knows for damn sure that when he arrived in the book he was a nameless thief who only existed to die to promote either the setting or the plot. (He hadn't intended to take over so much of the plot for himself. Whoops.)
Anyway, Rae shows up before her character's big execution, and sees that the only way out is to use her knowledge of the books to pretend to be a seer. Which would probably be a better plan if she'd ever actually read the first book, but she didn't. Her sister read it to her, but as she was busy having chemo and dying of cancer at the time, very little of it stuck and she's confused about a few things.
She's also not very smart. I hate to say, but it's true. She's constantly making decisions based on her beliefs about how the story is supposed to go and who the characters are supposed to be. She's constantly being shown that she doesn't understand any of these people even a little. She revises her individual opinions of people a little bit, but never actually examines her central belief that she knows how the story goes. Even at the end of the book where it's revealed that she forgot who her favorite character was her big worry is that she screwed up by not spending enough time matchmaking him with her character's stepsister, who is a perfect saintly angel who might have helped his moral compass a little.
1. In the books, he fell for this girl and then after she died he saved her corpse and made people kiss her dead feet. Ew.
2. A few chapters earlier, Rae had finally figured out that her sweet, doelike stepsister is actually as cool and calculating as they come, she just hides it really well. (Is this how the girl was always written, or is that some hotly-debated fantheory? Rae does not ask this question. I think probably she ought to.)
3. Her stepsister is in love with the maid. It's very sweet. You can't blame Rae for not picking up on that, though, first because everybody in this book is amazingly oblivious to everybody's feelings, including their own, but also because the stepsister and the maid are really good at hiding their thoughts, feelings, and motivations from the world. Really, they're perfect for each other.
4. Other people who are oblivious to other people's feelings include Rae and her servant (well, he's not oblivious to his own feelings and neither is the maid, but Rae just will not recognize it even if somebody explained it to her with a powerpoint and a side of interpretive dance), Rae and the Cobra with regards to Marius being absolutely besotted with the Cobra (Marius is also oblivious, but to be fair, he doesn't know that being gay is an option), literally everybody with regards to the love affair between the foreign princess and the charmingly bisexual man whose name escapes me (sidenote: his family is amazing and shame on Rae for initially writing his twin sisters off as being exceedingly minor catty side characters), Rae and the Cobra with regards towards Lia's feelings towards men in general, and... listen, people just don't get people in this book. Or maybe it's a Rae-and-Cobra special.
So, yeah, there's a lot of feelings in this book. This is just as well, because the "original" plot and worldbuilding is pretty shaky, so it clearly only became a sensation for other reasons. Anyway, I got remarkably invested and may read it again before I return it to the library. Because with a long waitlist, returning early is the polite thing to do.
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I am really looking forward to the next book in the series! ^_^
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Yeah, it's only a couple of authors that I stopped reading mid-book. The list of authors that I flat-out won't bother with for various reasons is a bit long. But there's too much out there to read everything, no matter how much I would like to, so it matters little.
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A fact that infuriates me every day.
There's a series by Vivian Vande Velde in which there's a great VR device which, among other things, compresses time so you spend three hours playing a game but it seems to you to be three days, and every time I think of that series I think there are so many other uses for this than fantasy RPGs. For example, studying! Tourism on the very cheap! Catching up on your reading!
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Oh, boy! Yeah, forget playing a game! So many other things that I'd do with it, like studying fields of knowledge new to me! My wife just discovered a podcast that has 32,000 recs on AO3, so she's been grooving on that. I can imagine what she'd do with such a VR system.
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(Also, possibly, that Rae liked the stage version a lot and it was very far away from the original text.)
I think you're right that the stock characters of the story, before encountering the transplants, are meant to be wooden and tropey, and that still comes through. Maybe the full finished novel will be the one written when all the roles are filled and everyone gets one last run through the narrative to save themselves.
no subject
She seems to be trying to fix the plot, so maybe her changes - whatever she can get away with, I presume - are all for the best.
Maybe the full finished novel will be the one written when all the roles are filled and everyone gets one last run through the narrative to save themselves.
Except the king, because fuck that asshole. Like, the writing makes a big deal about how grimdark the setting is, but... actually, he's the only person who seems interested in wrongdoing at all? Both the wicked advisors were not wicked enough to wish for Rae's secret assassination, one seems to have tried very urgently to get her not to walk to her arrest, everybody in the street-of-doing-crimes took the time to warn Rae that it was dangerous to walk on that street, especially with Key - except Key's blacksmith buddy, who warned him about her. (Sidenote, I like that blacksmith. She makes a big impression given how few lines and scenes she's got, and she's connected to two major-but-not-viewpoint characters. Since there's guaranteed to be at least one more wildcard immigrant walking around I'm hoping it's her.)
Like, everybody is clearly just doing their best to do their best, and that asshole king is just assholing it up.