Long Live Evil
Apr. 9th, 2025 02:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alobearLong Live Evil by Sarah Rees Brennan is about Rae, a young woman dying of cancer, who is given the opportunity to jump into the world of her sister's favourite fantasy book series, to find some kind of flower of life and death that will supposedly cure her in the real world.
I was encouraged by the fact that the audiobook was read by one of my favourite narrators - Moira Quirk - but unfortunately the multitude of different, slightly over-the-top accents for all the characters was a bit much.
I love a meta narrative - and Rae's observations about the world of the books are initially very amusing - but the worldbuilding within the fantasy realm was over-complicated and the additional complexities of Rae's awareness of being inside a book made the story quite difficult to follow.
I was expecting the whole thing to be pretty silly and was pleasantly surprised by the emotional depth and engagement of the opening sections between Rae and her sister in the real world. Then, the tone and humour of the initial sections once she's inside the book were very entertaining. But neither the emotional weight nor the clever humour were maintained for long, and I was very quickly both lost and bored.
So, I decided to cut my losses, since it's a long book and only the first in a series I'm confident I wouldn't have wanted to continue.
I was encouraged by the fact that the audiobook was read by one of my favourite narrators - Moira Quirk - but unfortunately the multitude of different, slightly over-the-top accents for all the characters was a bit much.
I love a meta narrative - and Rae's observations about the world of the books are initially very amusing - but the worldbuilding within the fantasy realm was over-complicated and the additional complexities of Rae's awareness of being inside a book made the story quite difficult to follow.
I was expecting the whole thing to be pretty silly and was pleasantly surprised by the emotional depth and engagement of the opening sections between Rae and her sister in the real world. Then, the tone and humour of the initial sections once she's inside the book were very entertaining. But neither the emotional weight nor the clever humour were maintained for long, and I was very quickly both lost and bored.
So, I decided to cut my losses, since it's a long book and only the first in a series I'm confident I wouldn't have wanted to continue.
