book reviews forevermore

I grew up on portal fantasies. It was a tremendously popular trope for 1970s and 1980s fantasies, from the junior reader The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and The Phantom Tollbooth, followed by Pamela Dean’s The Secret Country, to the terrible Thomas Covenant series, to some of Andre Norton’s Witch World, to Zelanzy’s Nine Princes in Amber and Terry Brooks’ Landover. You get the idea. It was a popular trope back then. The Andrews have thrown their own book into the ring with This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me. Despite them occasionally hitting bestseller list with their Kate Andrews series, I suspect this one will be much less successful.

It begins with a young woman, Maggie, who states in the first chapter that if this was a ‘normal’ portal fantasy, “I was meant to appear in this new world as a woman of prophecy with magic holy powers… I would be met by a prince or some high ranking and stunning noble… failing that, I could wake up in the body of the female lead…after she… died… Alternatively, I could come to in the body of the villainess… If not the heroine or the villainess, I could be their best friend.” But Maggie enters as none of these things; she “went to sleep in my apartment south of Austin and woke up in Kair Toren.”

Oh dear. I am all for meta fiction, but that is too much non-specific description of how the story could have gone. If you are going to run us through the plot scenarios, pull a Jo Walton and do a direct genre homage. However, I continued because of an interesting hook: in chapter two, she dies and revives. Django Wexler had a lot of fun with that in How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying, so I was encouraged with the potentially fun angle. The other hook to this story and it’s accompanying metaness is that Maggie seems to have stepped into the beginning of her favorite–but unfinished–fantasy series. It turns out the first plot line they suggested to us will be the one they follow: a woman of prophecy.

Well, alright. So I follow along and it seems we are doing a sort of story-within-a-story framework (never my favorite; see Horowitz) only instead of Maggie telling the original story, she provides a plot summary and then outlines possible actions based on what happened in the book.

“That subplot was the first time in my life I had screamed at a book. She was this cool, powerful woman who wanted nothing to do with the swamp that was the political underbelly of Kair Tonen, and the narrative had crushed her in the worst, most painful way possible. Galiene was one of the reasons I needed the third book to come out. I wanted my vengeance, damn it.” So she gives Galine some advice: “You will die in a fire, bleeding and hugging your daughter’s lifeless body. You must bring her into the Garden. Hreban cares about public opinion and won’t risk attacking it directly. Don’t wait. Go right now.”

Well, this could work, potentially. Except the pattern that is used in chapter three and four–current plot event, historical book significance, and future book plotting–tends to be how Andrews approaches every single plot point. Renting a private room, seeing a thief punished, meeting with the king of thieves: all are described through that triplicate structure before it meandering into action. It makes it extremely slow going. Worse, the fact that we are getting the plot of an imaginary book as recounted by a character in this book means we can’t form our own conclusions. We are literally being told what happens and how Maggie interprets it. Jasper Fforde used this to some effect with his Thursday Next series, but instead of an imaginary book, he relied on the reader’s familiarity with such classics as Jane Eyre. Using a familiar story provides the reader with a sense of anticipation–we know how the plot of Jane Eyre goes; what will this author do with it? This technique works better with a more simplistic mythic story such as Guy Gavriel Kay uses in The Finovar Tapestry series, but this story of Kair Toren is too complex.

So, dear reader, I made it to 35% before I quit. I was just having a hard time caring about this mythical story within a story, even as told by someone who was passionate about it. Oh, and I didn’t go into it, but Maggie meets at least three different men that seem to be attracted to her. I might have eyerolled a bit.

I do have book OCD, so I jumped ahead to the last few chapters to get a sense of which kind of portal fantasy this was–was it the kind where the heroine returns to Earth? The parallel universe? Or a settle in? I won’t spoil the answer, but I will share one very strong personal peeve: there’s a cliffhanger ending. A big one. I was seriously irritated and disappointed, because in all their series, I felt like Andrews have done a decent job finding an endpoint that still leaves the reader wanting more. This endpoint… wow. You only do this kind of ending if you are a budding author pushing out your first novella for free and wanting your reader to buy the second.

Despite my strong love for the Katie Daniels series and the first of the Hidden Legacy series, this is one that I can’t recommend. I suspect it will be a hard sell for even the hard core Andrews fans.