Fiction Reviews
This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me
(2026) Ilona Andrews, Tor, £22, hrdbk, 472pp, ISBN 978-1-035-08937-6
When you’ve been reading genre books for a while, you start to notice those common themes or tropes that pop up with regularity – the Final Girl, the Mary-Sue, the Chosen One, the Wise Mentor and so on.
Most of the time they’re accepted – because it’s not always about the destination, it’s the journey, right? And it can be remarkably comforting, knowing that characters and concepts you read are easy to follow and understand, that you know all’s going to end well in the end.
Which brings me to this fantasy novel. This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me takes all those Fantasy tropes and places and relishes in them. It is the story of a character in a book being in her favourite book, accepting that and surviving that.
When Maggie wakes up cold, filthy and naked in a gutter, it doesn’t take her long to recognise 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 rereading, while waiting years for the final novel. It is a city peopled with ruffians, spies, malcontents and murderers, in which she must survive as a great war looms ahead.
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.
You don’t have to know all the tropes – many of them are explained along the way – but those readers who do know them will have a lot of fun watching Ilona (actually two writers, the husband-and-wife team of Ilona Gordon and Andrew Gordon) take those common Fantasy themes, archetypal characters and iconic Tolkien-esque places, and with a knowing nod and a wink, turn them into a story within a story. Much of the time you think you know what is going to happen or that you think you know the archetype, only for the writers to take a left turn or pull your rug of comfort from beneath you.
It is all wonderfully meta.
What would it be like to be living in your favourite novel? What would you do if you knew how things were going to go, having read it in the novel? Could you actually change things for the better – or worse?
The concept’s not really that new, but it is how the writers use these ideas that count. Good guys are not always good, bad guys are not what you think they are, all of which turn things around just when you think you’ve got a handle on things. In short, This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me is a lot of fun. I don’t think that its cover does the book any favours – it makes the book look like a typical romantasy novel, and that it is definitely not.
Instead, This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me is clever, but never showy. It celebrates the genre as much as it plays with it, and is an antidote to all that oh-so-cynical and depressing Grimdark stuff. That’s not to say that there aren’t nasty things happening, but This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me is never gratuitously violent or unremittingly grim. At the same time, it is also not cosy-Fantasy, where everything is nice and comfortable.
It did get a little complex towards the end as Maggie’s descriptions of characters and events yet-to-happen became more involved, to the point where I had to stop more than once and think about who was doing what and to whom as mentioned a hundred pages previous, although this is no Game of Thrones. It does become more ‘tell’ and less ‘show’ at times, although this is perhaps to be expected, given the nature of the plot.
Overall, though, I was pleasantly surprised by this one – so much so that it is one of my favourite Fantasy reads of the year so far. Isn’t it great when a book is more than you expect?
Mark Yon
See also Tim's review.
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