#Sarah Rees Brennan

[may12324]

Been thoroughly enjoying long live evil ❤️

[ap0chulina]

Nothing will be funnier than reading "your poor little meow meow is built like a brick murder house" in an epic fantasy book, because you're absolutely right that IS a little meow-meow born to be a berserker bound to his vows 😌

[sarahreesbrennan]

So the title of book 2 is…

Are you ready for the Emperor? Are you ready for chaos? Are you ready for Time of Iron Book 2?

I hope you like the title. The green smoke was inspired by Scar from the Lion King and ‘Be Prepared.’ 💚😈

[oblivionsdream]

Happy release day to this book because it’s just so incredibly good and I need everyone to read it!!

If you like an isekai-ed villainess and so much wit then pick it up

[queerpiratebrainrot]

I wasn't prepared for the carnivore horse named Google Maps

[goodgrammaritan]

At the bottom were peasants, who grew food and carried away garbage. Society would collapse without them, so they were treated horribly.

Long Live Evil by Sarah Rees Brennan

[amberneonlights]

“I love you as a knife loves a throat”

- when a book is so good you have to instantly jump to make fanart, it was rly a joy to read and I can’t wait for the next one, i am gonna be a menace until it comes out!

[bibliobek]

Stunning, stunning, stunning edition of @sarahreesbrennan 's Long Live Evil 🖤🐍

I want to thank you so much as I had NOT been able to finish a single book for over a month(!!!). I finished LLE in a day. 🙈🙈

This edition is from Fairyloot 🧚🏻‍♀️

[ace-artemis-fanartist]

Rae from Long Live Evil by @sarahreesbrennan.

[agardenandlibrary]

[Rae and the Cobra hug after they both nearly die]

"My gosh, are they married?" whispered the new recruit hovering at Marius's elbow. "They are not married, they are deranged harlots," snapped Marius.

I'm so sorry for laughing at you, Mr. Last Hope, I know you take everything very seriously but. This is very funny.

[emily-e-draws]

just read Long Live Evil… many thoughts and they’re all about Key

[i-heart-sad-boys]

In real life, people let you go. That was why people longed for the love from stories, love that felt more real than real love.

-Sarah Rees Brennan from Long Live Evil

[sarahreesbrennan]

Here is my NEWS for AMERICA! Barnes & Noble chose LONG LIVE EVIL as their SFF Book of the Month. I am so excited. I send a thousand thanks to those within who advocated for the book and believe in the tale of someone in trouble walking into her favourite fantasy.

Honestly, things were going horribly for me for so long, I keep being like… is this going… well…? It can’t be, right? But maybe… yes! bursts into delighted tears thanks for believing in me and Evil, Barnes & Noble!

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/long-live-evil-sarah-rees-brennan/1144328593

[howlsmovinglibrary]

I'm sorry... I can't believe Rae didn't realise who the Emperor was in Long Live Evil. Asking to go down on her, killing a man, then taking her to his father's grave... ALL IN ONE NIGHT?! That's protagonist behaviour. The only way a man behaves that unwise and gets away with it, is if he has weight of the narrative behind him.

[blamebrampton]

Books talk to each other. Mostly because practically every writer is also a voracious reader, but also because books arise out of times and places and we share a lot of our worlds these days. So it’s unsurprising that several novels I have hugely enjoyed over the past few years share the theme of the antiheroine who is past all giving of the fucks. Naomi Novik’s powerful dark sorceress kept on her own tight leash in the Scholomance books was a joy to follow; Xiran Jay Zhao’s Iron Widow slashed her way into my heart and now Sarah Rees Brennan’s Long Live Evil has added to a list of beloved antiheroines that probably started for me with Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair.

Coincidentally, when considering how to describe Long Live Evil without significant spoilers, I realised that it shared several major themes with Vanity Fair. Young woman unfairly treated by fate decides to embrace her slut era to survive a war zone – both very accurate and wildly inaccurate for both. LLE opens with main character Rae in a hospital bed, teasing her sister about a book series they both adore. Rae is taking refuge in the story they have shared over years because it is one of the few things they have left: she is losing her fight against cancer and has been losing parts of her life, family and memory as that fight has progressed.

My personal hospital experiences have all been to do with major traumas rather than illness, which I vastly prefer because if you don’t die in the first couple of days, you usually start mending and you can immediately make plans to make the best of whatever you’ve broken. Rees Brennan, however, famously wrote a very funny, very horrible, ‘Kids, you won’t believe what shenanigans your girl’s been up to now, it’s only stage four Hodgkins lymphoma!’ post on her Tumblr or LJ (someone who has been hit in the head with taxis fewer times than me will doubtless factcheck that in the notes) about seven or eight years ago and then faced the very serious business of trying to live. The hospital scenes are painfully authentic, as are the stories of people who have left Rae as she slipped further out of everyday life.

For Rees Brennan, a loving family and peer group were there to hold her as close as they could. For Rae, only her beloved little sister, Alice, and Time of Iron, their favourite fantasy series, remain. They read the books together, remember adventures cosplaying and watching the musical, they wonder about the final instalment; for Rae it’s a joy she can still share (even if she doesn’t remember as much as she should), for Alice, it’s her two greatest loves. When a strange woman offers a door into the world of the book and a possible magical cure to Rae, she wants it as much as she disbelieves it.

Stepping into Eyam, the land of Time of Iron, Rae finds herself in the body of a villain doomed to die the next day. No worries! She’s thought and fought her way out of worse scraps than this in her past as a head cheerleader, let alone while battling cancer. She can use her knowledge of the plot to change things! If only she remembered more of the books…

Portal fantasies are common enough, but not all play by the same rules. This isn’t Narnia, where the magical world is more real than our own, for Rae, the world of the book is nothing more a tool to get her hands on the cure. She doesn’t need to care about any of these people, they’re not real. Most of them speak in a formal language that relies on the conventions of fantasy literature (there is an ongoing, warm-hearted skewering of all Game of Thrones-esque texts running through both the story and the in-text ‘quotes’ from Time of Iron) and half the characters are known more by their descriptions rather than their names. So she will play the Beauty Dipped in Blood, with her questionable morals, impractical clothes and centre-of-balance-distorting boobs for the weeks that will pass until the cure is available. Whoever she has to shuffle in the plot to secure a place beside that cure, she will shuffle. While she’s not out to kill anyone, it’s not as though they were ever really alive. Not like her. If she has to be the villain to survive, she will be an impeccable one. The people will cheer evil on!

Obviously, little goes to plan. Rae’s illness has taught her cruelty, but she hasn’t forgotten what it is to be kind. Even as she manipulates her role into ongoing main character, she realises that’s not how anyone gets a happy ending. That’s not how she can live with herself. As she comes to think of the other people in the story as real, they become more so, both in how we read them and in how they impact the story. Rae remembers what it is like to make friends, which she never meant to, but, oh, the luxury after years of watching people slip away!

As in previous novel In Other Lands, Rees Brennan has a long list of fantasy tropes to embrace and undermine, and her deft touch with humour is as evident as ever here, but her publishers call this her first adult novel and there is a shift in tone from her previous works. Anger is more real and lasting. Consequences are more significant. Understanding is reached for, even if it’s bitter. One of my favourite things is that she lets her female characters rage, but never judges those who can’t, whether because they’re too powerless or just too tired, and her male characters are allowed to be people if they choose to be — which all but the most vainglorious do.

I hadn’t paid much attention beyond checking the release date for the book, so didn’t realise it was the first in a series. For me, it worked perfectly as a standalone novel, even with the unended threads, which would have perfectly balanced Rae’s unfinished life. That said, I am very happy to know we will spend more time with these characters in the future. I want more. I do want to know if there is a hope for Rae, if this is the fever dream of a fading life, if this is the story Alice has told to ease her sister from the world or something else. There are a dozen characters I hope for, at least three happy endings that would bring joy. But don’t wait for the next books: sink your teeth into this one and believe what it says about the importance of listening to stories rather than just falling in love with characters. Though if you find yourself cheering on Rae, or her servant Emer, the elusive Eric, Horrible Hortensia or almost any of the others, I am the last person who will judge you.

[literarybutconditional]

Okay but seriously. This is why I sometimes get lost in the fanfiction black hole because why on Earth not read a new flavor of my favorite ship?

This book is so meta and brilliant.

Long Live Evil by Sarah Rees Brennan