A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

Rae is 20 and dying of cancer. For the last several years, her main consolation has been her younger sister Alice and Alice's favorite fantasy trilogy, Time of Iron. Due to brain fog and fatigue, Rae has read the second two novels but not the first, which she knows only via what she remembers from Alice reading it to her and recounting events to her - but that's not all that much, again due to brain fog and fatigue. However, she does have a massive crush on the antihero protagonist, the mortal king in book one who becomes a semi-undead, all-powerful emperor in Book Two.

This is all relevant because a weird woman walks into her hospital room and offers to transport Rae into the body of a character from the novel, with the deal that if she can pick a highly guarded flower that blossoms once a year, she'll be cured and returned to her own world. Rae takes the deal, only to discover that 1) she's in the body of the villainess, 2) the villainess is slated to be executed the next day by the very angry currently-king, emperor-to-be.

Rae quickly realizes that she needs to assemble Team Evil from the people she has, consisting of one angry maid destined to become an axe murderer and one cheerfully sociopathic guard who she doesn't remember from the books at all. Lucky for her, she does know what's going to happen. Sort of.

"Person gets transported into their favorite fantasy novel" is a big genre in Asia, but this is the first one I've read (and the first western one I've encountered.) So this is a review from total ignorance. I'd be very interested to hear how it's similar to and different from other isekai novels, from people more familiar with the genre. For instance, I enjoyed how Rae was actually not all that familiar with the novel, but for all I know that's a totally normal trope of the genre.

I had mixed feelings about this book. There were parts that I loved. There were parts that I thought were extremely well-done. There were parts that left me cold. And there were parts where I wished the story had gone in a different direction that would have appealed more to me personally.

All the parts involving Rae's cancer were extremely good. Sarah Rees Brennan had cancer herself (she discusses this in the afterword) and it's one of the more realistic depictions of severe illness - including the social repercussions - that I've come across. Unfortunately, that was all so realistic and heartfelt that it made me want the rest of the book to have at least a little more realism and emotional heft.

This is an extremely quippy book. Rae is a quip machine, and so are several other major characters. Unfortunately, I didn't find most of the quips actually funny, so I spent a lot of the book wishing she would just stop. But most readers loved the banter and jokes, so your mileage will probably vary.

Quips aside, there were a couple areas where I really wished for more emotional weight. The whole book is about Rae being in a villainess's body and celebrating being evil. But she's not actually evil. She's just hot. The villainess is very curvy and it's a puritanical world, so Rae just wears low-cut dresses and lives in goth quarters, and that's "evil." It's like goatees being evil in the Star Trek Mirrorverse - it's a fashion statement. Plus commentary on how we view sexual women as evil, which is certainly true in real life, but not so much a thing in fantasy books nowadays.

Rae never, not once, does anything even slightly evil to anyone. Some of her decisions have bad consequences for others, but that's always because she made a mistake, not because she intended to harm anyone. I found this frustrating, because I wanted Rae to be tempted at least a little by actual evil. When I had a life-threatening illness, I sometimes wondered what I'd be willing to do in exchange for getting a healthy body back. That's Rae's entire motivation, so I wanted her to actually wrestle with "What would I be willing to do to be healthy again?" But she doesn't get put in a position where she would have to do something actually bad in order to save her life until the last few pages, so there's only like 30 seconds of dilemma.

For a lot of the book Rae thinks the characters aren't real, but she still never does anything bad to them. So when she finally realizes that they are real, it doesn't feel meaningful because she's been treating them like real people all along.

But! There was also a lot that I did like. I loved Key, the cheerful sociopath bodyguard. He was by far the most fun character in the entire book, and the only one I got emotionally invested in. This was also the most clever part of the book - it explains exactly how writers get people to fall in love with a villain, and then goes step by step through the process and makes us fall in love with Key. Brilliantly done.

I loved Key and Rae's relationship, which was very iddy for me. It was "sociopath attack dog on a leash who loves only you," plus femdom overtones. And their banter was often actually funny - I'm thinking especially of when Key is trying to tell her he wants to go down on her, and she doesn't know any of his euphemisms. I was totally invested in them as a couple.

I also enjoyed Emer and Lia, a pair of supporting characters. They had sympathetic motivations, and they didn't constantly wisecrack.

Also, the ending was KILLER. (A killer cliffhanger, just so you know.) ( Read more... )

I also appreciated that the fantasy book excerpts are extremely plausible as an actual popular book series.

So, will you like this? I think that depends on how funny you find it. If I'd been more charmed by the banter and musical numbers and the comedy in general, then the goatee evil would have been perfect. I'm definitely going to read the sequel, though.

Fandoms I am considering nominating (click on tags to find what I've written about them before):

New to Yuletide:

George R. R. Martin's "Thousand Worlds" space opera stories.

Lois Duncan's psychic kids boarding school YA Down A Dark Hall.

John Woo's film Red Cliff.

Sarah Rees Brennan's Demon's Lexicon.

Vonda N. McIntyre's post-apocalyptic novel about healing, snakes, and biological engineering, Dreamsnake.

Nominated in previous years:

Peter O'Donnell's comic strip and novels about the woman in my icon, Modesty Blaise.

Anne McCaffrey's Pern.

Sherwood Smith's Inda series.

Ann Maxwell's space opera Fire Dancer.

Is anyone thinking of requesting any of these? What are you all thinking of nominating?

This is one of the best and most entertaining fantasies I’ve read all year, with a compelling protagonist and plenty of new twists on old ideas. I highly recommend it. I also highly recommend that you avoid spoilers before reading it. If you click on the Amazon link, I suggest not reading any of the reviews.

Nick and Alan are teenage brothers who’ve been living on the run after demons killed their father and drove their mother insane. Periodically, the demons track them down, Alan kills some of them and Nick kills lots of them, and then they run again.

Nick is good at killing things. He’s not good at understanding other people’s emotions and relationships, or at having feelings himself other than killing rage, a bewildered contempt for most of humanity, sexual impulses, survival instincts, and a deep attachment to his brother that he doesn’t understand. One might expect a character with such a narrow range of emotion to get tiresome with long exposure, but the more I saw of Nick, the more intrigued I became.

This is just as well, because the novel is basically a character study with lots of plot and action, plus well-developed supporting characters. But it’s really all about Nick and how he sees the world, trying to puzzle out social interactions via the rules he thinks he’s deduced. Though he’s normally intelligent, his profound disconnect with emotions and human relationships makes him misunderstand or miss entirely all sorts of moments that the reader understands perfectly. At first this is often funny, but later on it becomes heartbreaking. If this sounds sentimental, keep in mind that I’m talking about a guy who seriously considers killing his own mother in order to save his brother and is baffled by the strength of his brother’s objection to this perfectly reasonable idea.

About all the rest I can say without spoilers is that there’s lots of banter, a fairly light tone for the most part with the darkness running mainly underneath, and a protagonist I wouldn’t want to meet but loved reading about, and haven’t been able to get out of my head since I finished the book.

View on Amazon: The Demon's Lexicon

( Beware enormous spoilers both below cut and probably in comments )