This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me (Maggie the Undying #1) by Ilona Andrews

Ilona Andrews’ love letter to fantasy fans is a fabulously fun and entertaining novel with fantastic intrigue, enjoyable storytelling and interesting examination of the butterfly effect.

“It sank in. This wasn’t fiction. This was my reality”

I was not ready for how much fun this book turned out to be, especially heading into this after finishing two pretty dark and heavy books. This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me (TKWKM) is a masterful love letter to fans of the fantasy genre in a book that is as enjoyable as it is clever. I am thankful to Tor for my review copy.

“Kair Toren in a nutshell. One moment you are flying high and screaming at the world, the next moment someone bites your throat and drags you off into a dark alley”

Haven’t we all picked up books and series that we all just want to disappear into, sometimes literally? Having conversations with some of our favorite characters, trade snarky barbs, share a drink, swap secrets – haven’t we imagined doing this one time or another? Traveling to the lands described in the books, even more so when these are fantastical lands with a host of magical creatures, as is with Fantasy novels. Re-reading the books and series over and over again, so much so that it feels like you are virtually living in those lands and with those characters. Ilona Andrews captures those emotions and feelings perfectly through Maggie, a die-hard fangirl of a major fantasy series that spawned two successful books and a long-pending third book, who finds herself transported to the city of Kair Toren from Austin. The book doesn’t concern itself with how and why Maggie was ported here (as of now), but more with the time Maggie lands in the world of her dreams. Portaled into this world before some of the momentous events of the first book of the series, Maggie knows the events, the key players, and how a lot of these things will play out; she has to if she will become a player in this game set in Kair Toren.

“If this was fanfic, people would’ve trashed it for sheer implausibility”

The book gets off to a flying start, and a good part of it stems from the narrator’s voice. Maggie is a character we can all root for and relate to. Armed with almost encyclopedic knowledge of the land but with no practical skills necessary for survival in Kair Toren, we find Maggie three days after she has been transported. When we meet Maggie, we find a character who has realized her information is power and needs to find a way to benefit and survive from it, as she has no way back home. Given these circumstances, Maggie is desperate for a break, albeit knowing where to get her start.

“Maybe I just thought I was a nonviolent person because in my old life nobody had ever backed me into a corner with a knife at my throat. This was a different world and it played by different rules. I didn’t have the safety net of social services and law and order to back me up. There was no 911 to dial”

Once Maggie gets her start (which also leads to interesting consequences and discoveries), the book just takes off and reveals just how intensely clever, fun, and dynamic it is. Maggie’s superpower in this setup is her knowledge acquired through reading the book multiple times, but that is only useful up to a level, which is where the whole butterfly effect comes into play. Maggie knows any deviation from the plot of the original book for whatever reason may negate what she knows about the future, and she can only nudge things so much. Her priority goes from survival to saving as many people as she can from the course of events detailed in the books. Maggie realizes that she now has a stake in this world, and it’s not just fictional. That makes Maggie a fantastic character to root for as she dangles the information that she has effectively to influence, coax, threaten, and wheedle her way through the course of the book.

“The timeline was fighting me, and it was winning” 

The clever part of the book lies in the duality of the proceedings and the story timeline. Maggie sets herself up as an information broker while dealing with some dangerous people and teasing them with their past to establish her bona fides while “predicting” the future. While some of this exposition can get a bit too much, especially with the number of names and clans thrown in, the politics of the situation are often intriguing enough that you pay attention to, especially to certain key characters who are extremely critical. Once she reveals the information and the previously written fate for the character, she finds allies and means to overcome this. While this can sound like a bit of a cheat and can be tiring at the hands of other authors, Ilona Andrews delivers this part fantastically well – almost a sharing of juicy gossip. There is a fair bit of telling and not showing, given Maggie has to decide how to play out the information she has, but in the context of this story, it works remarkably well.

“References to twenty-first-century video games were solely for my own amusement”

A thing I cannot stress enough is how much fun this book is. Portal fantasies are a bit of a cheat in the sense that the characters use their Earthly knowledge to dazzle whenever possible. Time-related shenanigans are obviously fun, and TKWNKM uses the time element in terms of the knowledge of the future. TKWNKM combines both of these heady themes in an incredibly deft and facile way, and, because the timeline also fights back to Maggie’s intervention, you are definitely left guessing and want to know what is next. I also rolled into this one after finishing a couple of massively heavy grimdark books and found this to be even more fun due to that. Make no mistake, there is violence, there are gruesome deaths and moments of torture in between (an indicator of how life and death the stakes are), but the writing, the characterization, and the flow are so good that you are just immersed in the narrative.

“Why was nothing ever simple in this damn city?”

A lot is going on in the book, but the twin-plot narrative keeps things moving. A lot of history, politicking, and bad blood get shared, leading to an information and name deluge at the beginning of the book. I do admit not paying much attention to these at the beginning of the book, focusing more on Maggie’s adventure, but a massive reveal at the mid-point makes all the history seem very important and relevant, and I had to revisit some of the earlier portions of the book to get my bearings. That’s possibly the biggest quibble with the book. The book does rely on tropes in the beginning, but given Maggie’s butterfly effect, a lot of the tropes vanish into interesting alleys for the plot to explore..

“Damn dog killer. Every time I read that scene, I wanted to murder him.” (A clever commentary on a polarizing character of our world)

The book also doesn’t shy away from the heat and spice that Maggie feels regarding a certain character in the book. Given I had read the Kate Daniels series, this was par for the course for the authors, and while I normally don’t read romances or romantasy, it works in this book and is an important part of the plot. There is also a love triangle that makes its way towards the end of the book, and I just had a huge grin on my face reading through it. It would be a disservice to label this book as a romantasy but this is definitely romance, heat, and spice done quite well. More importantly, Maggie remains a flagbearer for her agency despite the intense emotions she feels.

“Back home, having a stressful day had meant a customer got annoyed or one of the food delivery apps sneezed, so I had to hustle to make up the money. Here a stressful day meant trying to stop a serial killer and bargaining with a mercenary for the lives of your friends”

Interesting locations punctuate the city of Kair Toren, and Maggie wants to experience all of it. That is an interesting world-building mechanism, even if we are just constrained to the one location. The shared history of the land, however, keeps the reader aware of the wider picture, as do the appearances of some interesting creatures. Magic, hinted throughout the book, also belatedly makes its appearance – the magical tower of Kair Toren is always present in the background, and the authors find a way to bring up magic to help Maggie’s journey. I suspect magic will play a very important role in the future books. The series is titled Maggie the Undying, and there are a few situations where the undying part comes into play, but it’s never played for a gimmick or overused, and it is deployed only when desperately needed.

The finale is as action-packed as it is clever in the maneuvering of events by Maggie to stave off certain doom and disarray. Obviously, not everything goes to plan, but the finale is fantastic as it is frenetic and ends quite well, resolving certain threads. However, the actual ending of the book does leave things on a cliffhanger (bah!!!) even if it doesn’t go down the direction I expected it to go. It definitely pushes the book into exciting new territory and situations for Maggie.

“That’s one thing about you, Maggie. Being with you is never boring”

This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me is an absolute blast from beginning to end. It is clever, exciting, entertaining, and crafted with a lot of love. The narrative is constantly engaging, and the combination of the “portal fantasy + future loop” keeps things moving at a brisk pace. Maggie is a fantastic lead character to root for – spunky, righteous, moral, not too serious, and totally human. All of which makes This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me one of the most fun and entertaining books of the year.

This Kingdom will not Kill Me is available now, you can order your copy on Bookshop.org