As her whole life collapses, Rae still has books. Dying, she seizes a second chance at living: a magical bargain which lets her enter the world of her favourite fantasy series.
She wakes in a castle on the edge of a hellish chasm, home to the Once and Forever Emperor – her favourite fictional character. He’s impossibly alluring, as only fiction can be. However, in this fantasy world, she discovers that she’s not the heroine, but the villainess, in the Emperor’s tale.
Time to assemble a rogue’s gallery of villains and hatch an evil plot…
Rae is dying of cancer, her sister reading a series of fantasy books to her. A mysterious woman offers Rae a chance to survive, by entering her favourite book, and fulfilling a task there. What has she to lose? But she wakes up in the book not as the heroine, but the villain, scheduled to be executed the next day. She needs to call on her inner evil to survive.
For some reason I thought this was going to be a comedy romp (maybe the Guardian’s blurb ‘clever, funny, thrilling’ had something to do with that), say in the snarky vein of Wexler’s How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying. There is some snark, but it is actually quite dark, as Rae’s actions change the plot of the story she is now part of, and she slowly discovers that these 2d characters are actually 3d people, capable of suffering, and that no-one is all good, or all evil. The ending plays out in a wholly unexpected way, although the clues were there all along.
There is an ending, but it is the end of book one of a series, where some things have been resolved, but there is now a bigger issue to address. There are more books to come (both of the fictional series, and this real one). I would blurb it ‘clever, a bit dark, thrilling’.
