2026 fantasy, first in a possible series. Maggie Haley went to sleep
one night and woke up naked in a ditch in her favourite fantasy
series. She has nothing but a painful and specialised superpower, a
fanatical knowledge of the books, and a determination to survive.
Which is a good thing, because this is definitely a dark
fantasy series. I haven't read A Song of Ice and Fire or Leigh
Bardugo's Grishaverse but this sounded like what I've heard of them;
it's very much the sort of world in which everyone has a tragic
backstory and most of them also have unpleasant plans for the future.
There's a little bit of magic, but mostly it doesn't seem to affect
the way things work (though a city of 300,000 people, a similar size
to London in the early 17th century, is not constantly ravaged by
famine and plagues, and people even drink water though it's not clear
where it comes from, presumably not the filthy river or the sea).
The problem for me was that the pattern became repetitive. Maggie
meets someone, remembers how their story came out in the books, tells
them secrets from their past to convince them she's serious, works out
a way to make things better, and usually ends up adding them to her
found-family household. It's fine, and maybe if I'd read it piecemeal
I'd have enjoyed it better, but taken all at once it started to feel
like padding.
I do like the way the Andrews team subverts some of the isekai
tropes: Maggie doesn't wake up with fighting or magical skills, she
doesn't seem to be mentioned in any prophecy, and so on. She just
wants to keep people alive by foiling the plans of potential tyrants
and other villains, in particular the rioting throughout the city and
subsequent tyranny that will follow a particular assassination.
(Though this isn't quite isekai, because as far as Maggie knows she
didn't die in the real world, and it's not quite portal fantasy,
because there was no choice to go there or suggestion that there might
be a way back. That's fine, but Andrews writes as if both of those
were the same thing and this were squarely in the middle of them.)
And the book commits the sin of ending on a cliffhanger, which always
leaves me feeling less in charity with a story just as I'm about to
write the review. But there was enough that I enjoyed that I'll be
back for more even though This Book Did Not Thrill Me.
A second book, at least, is planned.