This Kingdom will Not Kill Me – Romantasy done Right

Earlier this year I read The Inheritance by Ilona Andrews and quickly swore to read more of her work. Her other new release is This Kingdom WIll Not Kill Me, which has been getting more mainstream buzz, likely because it is Andrews first book put out by one of the major publishers (I think it’s their first … this duo has written a lot of books). I had some reservations about this book at first, but I really like how Andrews straddles classic fantasy storytelling conventions with a heavier romance focus. This novel felt a lot like Romantasy written for fantasy fans, whereas much of the Romantasy market seems targeted at Romance fans. As someone who loves both styles of writing (and also Romance and Fantasy when isolated from each other), this felt fresh compared to a lot of what’s coming out right now. 

Comparable Media: Inkheart, Rook and Rose

Elevator Pitch:
In classic Isekai fashion, Maggie wakes up to find herself stranded in the world of her favorite novels. Rellas is a cutthroat world about to be put into the hands of a brutal tyrant.Without knowing how long she’s going to be stuck here, she’d like to avoid that fate from coming to pass. She leverages her encyclopedic knowledge of this world and its major characters to pass herself as an information broker, getting herself involved with assassins, swordmasters, and aristocrats. Oh, it also turns out she can’t die, though that doesn’t prevent her from experience pain when people stab her. 

What Didn’t Work For Me:
This book got better and better the further into it I got. However, I struggled a lot in the opening chapters. Andrews really throws a bunch of exposition at the reader. Every time a character or location appears, we get  a long backstory on their personality, story beats from the novels, and the cruel fate the books have in store for them. We also get those explanations whenever a new character gets mentioned for the first time. I understand this as a realistic portrayal of the way Maggie is interacting with the world: unlike many Isekai stories, Maggie comes in with encyclopedic knowledge of Rellas that she can bring to bear on her situation. Unfortunately, this meant a whole lot of hearing about characters and situations instead of engaging with them in a more dynamic way. Andrews put a lot of pieces on the chessboard immediately, but it really felt like I was spending 10 minutes listening to a character’s backstory only for them to become irrelevant for a very long time, with only a single small conversation to anchor their present interactions. I’d forgotten a lot of the important stuff when they popped into the story, which was frustrating. It just didn’t make for the most enjoyable reading experience.

It also sapped some of the political tension out of the series. While This Kingdom WIll Not Kill me isn’t a full-on political intrigue story, political machinations are a fairly major part of the tale. Maggie takes some actions to manipulate things from behind the scenes, but without knowing these characters (many of which we haven’t met at all yet, only heard backstory about), I struggled to care about those parts of the book. Instead, my favorite part from the first third of the book was Maggie making soap. There’s a lot of trust that all of this setup will begin paying dividends, but that didn’t make the opening section any less of a slog. 

What Worked for Me:
The good news is that once you get over the relatively long opening hump, This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me buzzes along nicely. It feels a bit like if Game of Thrones were written from a pulp/camp perspective. The world is brutal, with a good number of sympathetic characters acting in brutal ways to achieve their goals. But the prose and pacing are swift, and Andrews is more than happy to be transparent about how characters are feeling instead of asking you to piece the puzzle together yourself. There’s a good balance of Maggie being reactive to people who seek to control her with a more proactive approach to her achieving her goals. The pacing was relatively quick, and I didn’t feel like the plot beats got repetitive or expected. Nothing was mind blowing, but it was a consistently enjoyable read.

I’d be remiss to not point out some of the romance elements, as they grow to become a fairly major portion of the story. This Kingdom Will Not Kill us is very much an escapist fantasy: Maggie has plenty of men who find her interesting and alluring. She flirts and dances, and tries to balance their attraction to her with her own long-term goals. As a bonus – and this is what so many Romantasy books get wrong – is that the romance elements can’t be untangled from the nonromantic plot. Her emotions complicate her goals, and her goals complicate her romantic life in really satisfying ways. You get a couple archetypes of men in her orbit (ranging from shadow daddy to earnest golden retriever), and she’s constantly playing them off each other to maintain the independence to be a force for good in the world. I’ll return to some earlier complaints that excessive infodumping at the start hampered my enjoyment of the political elements, but the way Andrews blended romance and political intrigue was delightful.

Conclusion: a well-executed book that I’d love to see as a template for more Romantasy stories to follow