JOINT REVIEW: This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me by Ilona Andrews

JanineA- Reviews / Book Reviews / Recommended Readsepic fantasy / Fantasy / found family / Maggie the Undying / portal fantasy / resurrection / survival6 Comments

Sirius and I are both big readers of Ilona Andrews’ books, so when she asked me to review their latest with her, I went for it. Here is that review:

Sirius: When I heard that favorite fantasy authors were writing portal fantasy I was nervous. I am familiar with this genre but I have not read much of it and what I tried was written in Russian and how should I put it? Did not impress me much. So what I tried were couple of books where people from different worlds (mostly from “our” world) ended up either in the fantasy world or in the different historical time. The person in the different historical time was trying to change history and the person in the fantasy world was falling in love with prince/ duke/ king and of course she was the bestest and every powerful man wanted her. Why they wanted her? Oh who the heck knew.

I was disinclined to continue my acquaintance with the genre however when Ilona Andrews writes a new book of course I have to try it. I even had no idea that it was called the portal fantasy in English before they explained it on their blog.

Janine: Whereas I have loved the portal trope ever since I read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe at age nine (IMO there’s still no one better than C.S. Lewis was at writing about portals — there’s a reason why Philip Pullman, Mark Lawrence and Lev Grossman have all written portal fantasies inspired by Narnia). I had no idea you weren’t fond of that trope. It’s so dominant in the fantasy genre. Isn’t Harry Potter a portal fantasy?

Sirius: I am when you put it that way LOL. I think my understanding of what portal fantasy is was limited to the idea of Mary Sue type of character getting to another world and fixing it all better.  Of course I loved Harry Potter and Philip Pullman. If portal fantasy definition is the one I just looked up is just traveling from reality to new and fantastic world, then sure, I am all for it if well done.

Janine: Maggie wakes up dirty and cold near a trash heap in Kair Toren, the city that features heavily in her favorite fantasy novels, after being transported there in her sleep. She immediately recognizes that it is a real place — things described in the books, which she’s read so many times that she knows them like the back of her hand, are there, but they look different from the way they did in her imagination, and there’s too much detail for this Kair Toren to be a dream or delusion. She also knows–from the novels–that the city will burn at the hands of a nobleman named Hreban, and she doesn’t want to see that happen.

For three days, Maggie starves and tries not to get eaten by animal scavengers. Eventually she resorts to stealing from someone she knows is a bad guy. He kills her and she falls into the sea, then she washes on shore and wakes up. Her body, it turns out, can now resurrect itself.

Maggie finds temporary refuge but then must come up with a way to earn a living. She decides that since she knows so much of what the future holds and of the characters’ secrets, she can deal in selling information. She offers some to two dangerous men – crime lord Solentine and swordmaster Reynald. After she allies with Reynald to help him obtain revenge for the kidnapping of his fifteen-year-old son, Matheo, by slavers, Maggie also saves five kids from the same slavers. Two quickly become Maggie’s wards because they have nowhere else to go.

When Maggie tells Reynald (and the kids eavesdrop) that Kair Toren will be destroyed by Hreban, they team up and–with the help of a family of mercenaries they hire–set out to take down Hreban first. Whether they will succeed in changing the future enough to save Kair Toren and the kingdom of Rellas is the question at the heart of the plot.

Sirius: I loved This Kingdom. I didn’t read any reviews before I started the book, but I glanced at them while I was reading and I saw that some criticisms were about too much world building. I absolutely agree with *a lot* of world building happening in this book and no, reading about some rules and military orders in Kair Toren was not always my favorite part, however I think that it was necessary in the first book set in a very new world where we the readers have no point of reference whatsoever without authors telling us about it.

Janine: I do think there was a lot of exposition and I took the complaint about the worldbuilding in other reviews to be as much about how it was delivered as about how much there was. Maggie relates a lot of the events, character details, and social rules described in the fantasy novels. There is a lot of telling as opposed to showing. I did wish the balance was a little more even, but ultimately it didn’t detract much from my enjoyment.

Let’s talk a bit about the world of Rellas. Maggie describes as medieval-like but in terms of technological development, it read more like our eighteenth, or maybe even early nineteenth, century to me. There are toilets, running water, paper, comfortable (I think) carriages, and the ability to observe meteors coming down from above. Books are available readily and affordably enough that you don’t have to be in the nobility to have a personal library. They do have fortresses and fight with swords rather than bayonets, but other than that, the medieval part mostly comes in with how people dress (lots of doublets, lancer’s coifs, and tabards). The social structure is typical fantasy, with eight powerful families who (unlike commoners) have magical abilities jockeying for power under an unstable king.

I have a small complaint to make — at one point Reynald, one of Maggie’s new friends, comments on how he likes her phrase, “on the same page,” and she realizes she’s introduced a new idiom to Kair Toren. But contradictorily, most of the time the Kair Toren characters use idioms that seem very much of our own time and place, such as “I love what you’re doing with the place,” “Hold that thought,” and more. This inconsistency bugged me at first but then I decided that Maggie was translating their speech into ours and that helped. In general, I thought the writing was better here than in most Ilona Andrews’ books; the description was vivid and lovely, which isn’t usually the case with them.

Sirius: I agree with your description of this world. The exposition ended up not bothering me at all. I think it was a necessity to describe a bit more of the new fantasy world.  What sort of bothered me about it actually was the eight powerful families with magic. I am speaking more as a long term fan of their books (I know you are too).  When I learned about eight powerful families with magic exist my first thought was oh no, not again.  Do not get me wrong – I love magic and usually am very entertained by it, but I just wanted to see something different.

I loved Maggie. Her potentially being a Mary Sue was the main reason I worried about the story. I mean Maggie certainly has an important role to play in this world. By whose hand, remains to be seen (maybe at the end of the books we still won’t know the answer), but she wants to save the world of her favorite books and her favorite characters from falling in the cataclysmic war. And the story written in the books that Maggie knows so well is not finished. The third book was never published.

I did not think Maggie was a Mary Sue at all. [Other than resurrection] she really does not have special abilities besides being a good thinker, but as the blurb tells you she knows what is going to happen from the books and she tries to leverage that knowledge. She has her wits and she tries to use them and she is kind to people when she can be and she makes friends who are loyal to her. She knows of course that it is dangerous to change the future, but she cannot imagine how the changes in the timeline that her actions make might cause events to come out differently or sooner or not at all.

Janine: I really liked Maggie too. One of my favorite things about her is that she starts out as you say, with no special skills or life experiences, but as the story progresses and she gets more experience in navigating the challenges that Kair Toren throws at her, she also gets better at it. There’s an inner toughness to her that she does not know exists until she’s right there in the midst of various dangers, complications, and twists of fate.

As for the Mary Sue complaint, I think that comes in with the way powerful men either fall for Maggie or want to destroy her. But again, it didn’t bother me much. What did occur to me about Maggie is that she should have had a good cry over her separation from her world and her loved ones early on in the book. It seemed a little unbelievable that she adjusted with so little emotional impact.

Sirius: Yes, if one more powerful man would want her, I would find it annoying. Well she remembers her parents and brother several times throughout a book and misses them. I think with the amount of shock and trauma of some events it did not feel too jarring for me that she was not more shocked at the separation, but sure, if she was it would have been even more believable. As something connected to the trauma she goes through, I loved that even with her not able to die in this world authors made it into enough vulnerability for the characters. She cannot die permanently, but she is certainly capable of dying horribly before she comes back to life and she imagines a couple of scenarios where she might not be able to wake up.

Janine: That did add some tension and stakes.

Sirius: The book is not a romance yet, but there is certainly a potential love interest or two.

Janine: I agree that at this point this is a fantasy novel and not (yet?) a romantasy. But I felt that a relationship was beginning to take off and it was very clear who Maggie’s romantic partner was / would be.

Thus far this review hasn’t gotten too deeply into the reason I’m giving this book an A- and a recommended read. Here are just a few of many: The plot is exciting, with unexpected twists and turns; Maggie’s resourcefulness saves her more than once. The secondary characters are a lot of fun, too. My favorite was Lute, a mercenary in his late teens who shows Maggie unswerving loyalty and protectivness. I also liked Shana, the pragmatic mother/wife in the mercenary family, Galiane, the elegant manager of the Garden of Soft Blossoms, a discreet establishment that caters to the decadent desires of those who can afford it, and a certain female mage we eventually meet.

The very best aspect of the book IMO was the romantic relationship. The reasons I loved it are hard to go into because they are spoilery. I’m going to get into spoilers from here out so if you prefer to avoid them, stop reading!

How would you grade this book, Sirius? The first half felt a touch slow to me, but the second half was thrilling, and a lot of the joy of that depended on the set up for the big plot twist we discussed under the cut. The reveal was exciting precisely because there was suddenly so much more going on, so I can’t fault the first half for that lack. We should mention that there’s also a cliffhanger ending, but those are not an issue for me.

As I mentioned before, overall This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me is a an A- for me–I’m already reading it a second time.

Sirius: A- and only because it is a trilogy. The ending of the trilogy should satisfy me before it becomes A or A+.

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Janine

Janine Ballard loves well-paced, character-driven novels in romance, fantasy, YA, and the occasional outlier genre. Examples include novels by Ilona Andrews, Mary Balogh, Aster Glenn Gray, Helen Hoang, Piper Huguley, Lisa Kleypas, Jeannie Lin, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Naomi Novik, Nalini Singh, and Megan Whalen Turner. Janine also writes fiction. Her critique partners are Sherry Thomas and Meredith Duran. Her erotic short story, “Kiss of Life,” appears in the Berkley anthology AGONY/ECSTASY under the pen name Lily Daniels. You can email Janine at janineballard at gmail dot com or find her on Twitter @janine_ballard.

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