Bogormen

Title: Long Live Evil
Author: Sarah Rees Brennan
Genre: Fantasy
Rating: 3/5
# pages: 431 pages
Date read: August 2026

When her whole life collapsed, Rae still had books. Dying, she seizes a second chance at living: a magical bargain that lets her enter the world of her favourite fantasy series.

She wakes in a castle on the edge of a hellish chasm, in a kingdom on the brink of war. Home to dangerous monsters, scheming courtiers and her favourite fictional character: the Once and Forever Emperor. He’s impossibly alluring, as only fiction can be. And in this fantasy world, she discovers she's not the heroine, but the villainess in the Emperor's tale.

So be it. The wicked are better dressed, with better one-liners, even if they're doomed to bad ends. She assembles the wildly disparate villains of the story under her evil leadership, plotting to change their fate. But as the body count rises and the Emperor's fury increases, it seems Rae and her allies may not survive to see the final page.


I had a really weird time reading this book.

I listened to the first ~40% as an audiobook, and kept losing focus. I'd get the characters mixed up, kept zoning out, and generally just considered giving up on it, as it couldn't keep my interest.

However, I was reading it for a book club, so in order to actually be able to finish on time, I switched to the ebook instead ... and finished it in two days!

It wasn't that the narrator was objectively bad - she didn't speak in a monotone, have weird inflections, use a sing-song voice or anything like that (all stuff I've DNF'ed an audiobook due to) - for some reason, she just couldn't hold my attention!

So in the end, I actually quite enjoyed the book - or at least the part of the book that I read for myself. I liked how the characters interacted, and how they slowly changed from being two-dimentional book figures, to being three-dimensional people that Rae actually cared about.

I'm not sure I got the idea of the book though. I mean ... why did Rae get send into the book in the first place? Sure, I know what was in it for her, but what was in it for the lady who visisted her?

It did end on quite the cliff-hanger, and I'm not sure that I enjoyed it enough to read the rest of the trilogy.