This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me
Maggie the Undying #1
By Ilona Andrews
ISBN: 9781250377265
Author’s website: Ilona-andrews.com
Brought to you by OBS reviewer Omar
*Beware Spoilers*
Summary
A page-turning, unforgettable fantasy set in a city populated with ruffians, spies, malcontents and murderers. Experience out-of-this world adventure and dangerous politics as Maggie tries to survive waking up in her favourite fictional world.
A heart-pounding epic from No. 1 New York Times bestselling author duo Ilona Andrews.
When Maggie wakes up cold, filthy and naked in a gutter, it doesn’t take her long to recognize Kair Toren. It’s a city she knows intimately from the pages of a famously unfinished dark fantasy series – one she’s been obsessively reading and re-reading, while waiting years for the final novel.
Her only tools for navigating this gritty world of rival warlords, magic and mayhem? Her encyclopaedic knowledge of the plot, the setting and the characters’ ambitions and fates. But while she quickly discovers she cannot be killed (though many will try!), the same cannot be said for the living, breathing characters she’s coming to love – a motley band that includes a former lady’s maid, a deadly assassin, various outrageous magical creatures and a dangerously appealing soldier. Soon, instead of trying to return home, she finds herself enmeshed in the schemes – and attentions – of duelling princes, dukes and villains. This all while trying to save them and the kingdom of Rellas from the ending she’s seen on the a cataclysmic war.
This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me is the beginning of the most epic adventure yet from genre powerhouse writing duo Ilona Andrews. For fans of Samantha Shannon, Sarah J. Maas, Danielle L. Jensen and isekai portal fantasy.
Review
“To the Book Devouring Horde and all other readers who have dreamed about getting lost in a book”
What a twist, well twists. The first one I didn’t see come up; the age was odd, but I just brushed it off. The second one was expected after the first one was revealed.
This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me starts with Maggie waiting near a bridge for a black-market merchant to steal the gold he is carrying; per the story, she knew. Drenched in the cold rain that has been falling for the past few days, dressed in the rags she could steal and barefoot, Maggie managed to steal the bag of gold, but she also got stabbed multiple times, had her throat sliced, and was pushed into the river. Maggie dies.
That is the first time that Maggie dies in this book, but she wakes up hours later naked, again, clutching the bag of gold on the banks of the river she fell into. With the gold she stole, Maggie can now buy herself some safety for the night, in the only place she knows nobody will ask questions, the Garden. But on her way there, while running in the rain, she sees the entourage of Ramond vi Everard, the Sleeping Duke, and the head of one of the Eight Great families, entering the city with him leading the way. Paralyzed by what she is seeing, she becomes even more stunned when he gives her some coins and tells her to find shelter from the rain and rides off into the city.
Maggie manages to make it to the Garden, get a bath, a meal, and a good night’s sleep. With new strength, she decides to change the story she knows of the world she is now trapped in. First, she saves the life of an innocent girl, and then she works on preventing the massacre and war that is coming to the kingdom of Kair Toren at the hands of Ulmar Hreben, the head of one of the Eight Great families.
I loved This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me; Maggie is all of us readers who have read their favorite book or series many times which they quote from memory. Different from other Isekai genre stories, we don’t know how Maggie arrived in this world, and that is fascinating and mysterious. There wasn’t a truck that came out of nowhere, and she didn’t die from old age or illness.
Like the other books by author duo Ilona Andrews, their main character Maggie finds her group of sidekicks and a family. After raiding the house of a slaver and saving the kidnapped kids, some of them, without families, decides to stay and help. Clover, a seventeen-year-old lady maid, and Kaiden, a teen who wants to help.
Another sidekick is Reynald Karis, the Knight blade master, who is hired by Maggie as a bodyguard and is looking for his son. Like many readers, we all have our favorite characters that we wish their story could have been different, and Reynald is one of Maggie’s. Reynald is a fascinating character, smart, lethal, a strategist, and with good genes because he looks younger than his age in the books.
“Everything except his age. He’d become a professional soldier at seventeen and served in the King’s army for twenty years, so he was at least thirty-seven. The exact line in the book said, A harsh life of battles and marches added years to his face. He looked like a man who was a decade older.”
The main course of the story revolves around Maggie and her team trying to stop one of the Eight Great families from creating a massacre and rising in power by murdering important political figures, which then will cause an invasion from the neighboring country and a plague. Maggie continues to live out our fantasy of changing the course of our favorite books.
Given that this is a new series for Ilona Andrews and is a somewhat high fantasy setting, they had to world-build the new place we are reading. One thing that I liked is that there is magic in this world, but there are also skill marshal individuals without magic that make them deadlier. And so far Maggie’s “magic” is a stranger to everyone who learns about it.
For fans of Ilona Andrews, which I am, many can see their writing style and past ideas they had when reading this Kingdom Will Not Kill Me. The signature magic of the Eight Great families is also similar to the idea of House magic from the Hidden Legacy series. I felt I was collecting easter eggs as I read.
Given how this book ends, we are left with questions and hopes for what is to come. But we know a second book is in the works, as the series has been promoted as a duology, which is the same number of books that Maggie read, even though she was waiting for a third one for many years.
If you are a fan of Ilona Andrews, then I recommend you read This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me. Meet the fan who got sent into their favorite book series and is trying to save the kingdom that continues to try to kill her instead.
