Saturday, September 19, 2026

This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me

This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me by Ilona Andrews, 480 pages

Maggie has woken up naked, cold, and dirty in an alley, which she quickly learns is Kair Toren, the central city of her favorite book series. Then she promptly dies. Next thing she knows, she's waking up again in the same state as before, only this time, she's determined to survive. While it takes a few more life reboots to achieve her goal, she's soon ensconced among the dangerous and elite of Kair Toren, positioning herself as a seer by using her knowledge of the series. The only problem is that the series is unfinished, so there's definitely a limit to how much she can know, and if she changes things too much, well, that's pretty rough  too.

The fantasy trope of waking up in a favorite fictional world is an increasingly popular one (it's official name is "isekai," as it started as a common manga trope), and this is definitely a good example of the subgenre/trope, with the protagonist waking up in a vaguely Game of Thrones-esque world. However, as we never learn how Maggie got there or why she keeps reviving after her various deaths, it feels a bit unfinished. Similarly, the readers are told about the upcoming events only by Maggie's POV recollections of the books, so it feels like we're just along for the ride instead of becoming fully immersed in the world. I would've loved to get a bit of backstory before Maggie was deposited in Kair Toren, just to give us a glimpse of outcomes in the unaltered book-within-a-book. As it is, the plot meanders with no arc that is clear to us. That said, I'll definitely read the next book in this series, as I am curious as to where it all goes. But there are plenty of other isekai books I'd recommend first.

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