Fiction Reviews
This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me
(2026) Ilona Andrews, Tor, £22, hrdbk, 472pp, ISBN 978-1-035-08937-6
Romantasy meets portal fantasy in this superior series-starter from writing duo Ilona Andrews. This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me provides a fresh answer to a well-worn question: what would you do if you found yourself in your favourite book?
For some genre fans – Travis Baldree readers, say – this would be a fairly cosy daydream. Our twenty-something protagonist Maggie, however, is not so lucky. She has the misfortune to love the novels of Adrian Latour, the author of an unfinished grimdark fantasy series, chock full of power-hungry nobles, blood, monsters in human form and, of course, death.
[Somewhere in southern California, a highly successful writer with a jaunty hat and a luxurious beard feels a disturbance in the force.]
It is not, as Maggie puts it ‘a pretty-princess-rides-a-unicorn kind of series.’
And the royal city of Kair Toren is not the city to suddenly find yourself in with no friends and no resources. Part late medieval London, part Lankhmar, Maggie is well aware of how much danger she faces.
But she has at least two unusual things going for her, as well as her native guts and determination. First, Maggie knows the plot and the characters of the book like the back of her hand. If she can just get off the streets and into a position where she can use this information, there is much leverage to be acquired and a great deal of bloodshed that she could prevent. Her first use of this knowledge: to ambush a criminal, relieve him of his gold and get off the streets.
In doing so she discovers her second asset: in this world she cannot be permanently killed. Like a character in a computer game, she comes back to life each time she dies (which in turn raises interesting questions about the reality of her experiences… more of which later).
Maggie then puts her inside intelligence to good use in finding a home and begin righting wrongs. In doing so she builds a team of allies, assistants and archetypes around her: a plucky kid; a disgraced lady’s maid, a grizzled mercenary and his family, the aristocratic head of the thieves guild and Reynald, one of the best blademasters in the kingdom.
She’ll certainly need all the help she can get: Baron Ulmar Hreban will soon be making his bid to be the power behind the throne of Rellas and she knows from the books that he will wade through the blood of others to get there.
Yet not everything is as Maggie expects – character have their own off-page lives which can be very different what she has read of them in the books. Her master swordsman Reynald, for example, is a rather more charismatic and engaging person in ‘real life’ than she expected, making for an interesting partnership with romantic undertones.
And why is Ramond vi Everard, the notorious Sleepless Duke, riding the streets of Kair Toren when he should be in his border duchy of Selva far to the north? Who is the mysterious stranger dogging her path who knows more than he is letting on? The more her interventions change the plot of the novels, the harder it becomes for her to know exactly what will come next.
Other than a certain degree of knowingness, there is nothing fundamentally new about This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me. It overlays grimdark, romantasy and isekai fantasy elements on top of each other, which is clever, but the individual elements are nothing we haven’t seen before. But the thing about this book that sets it apart is that does very, very good things with this overlap of genres, combining to make it one of the best traditional fantasies that I have read in a long time.
It has so much to commend it: a compelling, likeable protagonist who knows too much for her own good; a richly woven and believable setting; vividly-drawn characters; political intrigue and empire-building; a genuine sense of danger for Maggie (despite her indestructability); and a well-paced relationship arc which runs with the plot rather than counter to it. The craft that Ilona Andrews displays here is absolutely top class.
…And it’s tremendously good fun to boot, managing a deft comic touch without breaking kayfabe.
How Maggie uses her knowledge of the books to make her way in the world is reminiscent of time travel yarns like Lest Darkness Fall, where the lead character uses their knowledge of a historical period and the future to make things better. To put it another way: there is a pronounced ‘woman build stuff’ element to Kingdom more generally, whether Maggie is rewriting the plot, cleaning up a former slavers mansion to turn it into her headquarters or just introducing Kair Toren to a new and better recipe for soap.
That Andrews also does a good job in leaving open the question of whether the world Maggie finds herself in is real or not. Without coming over unnecessarily Thomas Covenant she certainly acts as if it were a possibility, and clearly the fact she can’t die is an red flag, Yet she also treats everyone around her as a real person rather than lines on a page because that’s the right thing to do. So at least for the first book in the series, we’re saying yes to both possibilities.
This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me is going to get filed as romantasy whether it wants to or not – female protagonist; wish fulfilment; a range of magnificent cads as love interests – but whether you judge it in those terms or as straight-up fantasy it’s an outrageous success and can only be highly recommended.
Tim AtkinsonTim Atkinson
See also Mark's review.
[Up: Fiction Reviews Index | SF Author: Website Links | Home Page: Concatenation]
[One Page Futures Short Stories | Recent Site Additions | Most Recent Seasonal Science Fiction News]