Bless This Mess: Long Live Evil by Sarah Rees Brennan
I’m back! Been a while since I read something that was this bad and yet this compelling.
Young girl with gets isekai’d into her favourite (kind of) book series, into the body of the villainess, and has to survive. I was immediately sold on this concept, and then the execution, uh, left something to be desired.
Question up at the top for anyone who can help me out here: big boobie evil (maybe sorceress) lady who seduces the king. What are we referencing here? Where does this trope come from? Because this book was certainly interested in critiquing it and I just want to know. Please tell me where to find the big boobie evil villainesses, I need to know for science.
Let’s get into it.
THE MESS
We meet Rae in her hospital bed, being read to by her younger sister, Alice. I actually really like this opening chapter: it sets up their dynamic (Rae is protective of Alice), and the relationship with the books (Alice was a fan first, and then got Rae into it). They have a fight, because she’s having trouble paying attention to the book, but ultimately make up. Rae is embittered by the fact that she’s dying so young and, y’know what, fair enough.
From what I understand the author also went through cancer treatment in the past few years, and it shows. I think the depiction of cancer and Rae’s relationship to it is probably the book’s strongest element. I totally buy her rage, her grief, and her want for something else.
Rae is then approached by a mysterious woman who offers her the chance to go into the world of the book for a cure. She’s skeptical but goes along with it, and then, lo and behold, wakes up in the world of the Time of Iron series, as villainous Lady Rahela.
After getting over the shock of waking up in the kingdom of Eyam, Rae meets her brand-new kill-happy guard Key, and her longtime maid Emer. It’s the day before she’s going to be horribly executed for the attempted framing of her stepsister Lia, so first things first she has to stop that from happening.
A lot of people in reviews were annoyed by the modern language and meme-referencing that Rae does; I actually didn’t mind it. The jokes are outdated (she says “you’ll be powerful AF” at one point) and none of them were funny to me, but they also didn’t bother me much.
Key is from the city gutter and loves to kill and get money, and Emer hates Lady Rahela because the day before, Rahela told her they’d never really been friends. In order to gain their help, Rae swears this super-sacred oath to them both. I’m not sure if this has any magical component to it, but it seems to be taken very seriously. Key properly agrees but Emer doesn’t, though Rae doesn’t catch this. I don’t know if this matters.
Anyway, Rae goes to see the king. Lady Rahela is his favourite, but lately he has shown more preference for Lia (hence the framing). The king is supposed to become The Emperor later in the series, a dark and brooding horrible leader, and he’s her favourite character. She uses her knowledge of the series to convince him and the court that she’s a prophet, thereby avoiding execution.
After this, Rae decides she needs allies, so she approaches brothel owner slash noble lord, the Golden Cobra. Turns out, the Cobra’s actually from the real world too! He was brought under similar circumstances (dying, looking for the magical flower) but missed his window, and so has just made a life for himself here.
Here is something I liked: in their discussion, it turns out that the version of the story the Cobra was familiar with from the real world is different from Rae’s. The person known as “the Golden Cobra” didn’t exist in his own version, but he’s a somewhat major character in Rae’s version, and she’s even able to tell him how he dies, which is a shock to him. They begin to discuss a theme I was interested in and wish had been a little stronger: whether or not the other characters are real. She doesn’t see them as real people, but he does.
Oh, we should talk about the POV shifts. This was super jarring to me at first, I was expecting to be in Rae’s POV the whole time, and we’re not. We occasionally are in two other people’s POVs: Emer, her maid, who is pretty cool but ultimately I kind of think we could do without her POV, and Marius, who’s ostensibly one of the heroes of the Time of Iron series and —
Okay, so Marius, the “Last Hope” (don’t ask me where the title came from, we are never told). He’s from this berserker family that’s super violent, so he became a scholar instead, and vowed to never do violence and hung up his sword. That’s fine. He also grew up with the king and is extremely Lawful. I actually enjoy a morally-upright Lawful character, I like a Captain America or a Sturm Brightblade, but Marius sucks for like 98% of the book. He spends a lot of time slut-shaming Lady Rahela and thinking about how much he hates the Cobra, his closest friend. The most interesting thing about Marius is that he’s the Cobra’s favourite character but I do not understand why.
Minor gripe: too many snakes. Lady Rahela’s thing is snakes, the Cobra’s thing is snakes, the Emperor’s sword has a snake handle, too many snakes. I guess this gets paid off eventually when they decide their group name is “the vipers,” but aesthetically, it feels messy.
So Marius comes to see the Cobra and Rae, and we learn that they’re “friends” because the Cobra has been blackmailing him for years so that he obeys the Cobra’s commands (don’t worry about over what, it’s pretty minor and ultimately not important). The Cobra realizes Marius actually hates him, that he’s supposed to be killed by him later, and breaks off their agreement (this feels like it should be magical, but I don’t think it is).
The flower blooms once a year for one night, and is located in the palace greenhouse. Rae and the Cobra make a plan to steal the key to the greenhouse at an upcoming ball. In order to get an invitation to said ball, Rae attends an archery contest the ladies-in-waiting (the king’s prospective brides) are doing. Unfortunately, at the contest, the ladies are all attacked by ghouls (basically zombies).
Another thing I liked: the death stuff in Eyam culture. I could’ve done with a little more world-building, but I was decently satisfied by what I got. There’s this whole dynamic where the “unloved dead” are thrown into the nearby ravine (where they become zombies) but folks buy magic stones for their loved ones so that those they bury do not rise. Also, there’s a room in the palace called something like the “Chamber of Bones” where there’s a) a little boy’s skeleton on display and b) a throne where they put dead rulers to rot so that citizens can pay their respects. We’re told that later in the series, Lia’s dead body is preserved and put on this throne for all eternity by the Emperor. That’s cool and horrible!
Anyway the ladies are attacked by ghouls, and they have to try to defend themselves, mostly without guards because it’s a LADIES’ event so there are not allowed to be any MEN and I actually really liked this scene. Rae tries to protect the people there, including her fictional stepsister Lia who we meet for the first time, which doesn’t 100% mesh with her previous characterization, but sure. I was here for it. I was, dare I say it, having fun for a moment.
And then it was all ruined because the king and his guards arrive and immediately try to shoot the northern princess’ badass lady guard, because nobody is supposed to have weapons in hand around the king (which I’m a) pretty sure was only just now brought up b) doesn’t make a ton of sense because they thought they were walking in on an archery contest c) earlier the ladies aren’t able to get inside the palace because the doors are barred to prevent ghoul entry, meaning that whoever barred the doors knew there were ghouls outside, so why did they not start by shooting the ghouls). The cool lady guard dodges the arrow, but somehow this gets her killed by ghouls. Bummer.
Oh also this is all problematic because none of this happened in the story as Rae knows it. This should probably concern her more than it does. They also realize someone lured the ghouls to the ladies. This should probably concern her more than it does.
They deal with the ghoul problem, and there’s a truly baffling scene in which Rae is bitten by a ghoul and Key sucks the…ghoul poison…? out of her wound. We learn later on that the ghouls do seem to have some kind of poison, since one of the other ladies who gets bit is wasting away, but it isn’t established in the moment that this is a risk. I just found this whole scene real weird. There’s a moment where he steps on a stone meant to drain power and it makes him look weird, which is strange because he’s just supposed to be a regular guard from the slums.
So after the ghoul situation is resolved, Rae and Key go into the sketchiest part of the city to find a blacksmith. Key gives her his tragic backstory about being found at the side of the ravine, and then having been adopted but ultimately getting trained as a murderer. She tells him about being sick “as a kid.” They make out, he offers to go down on her in the middle of the street, she uses her gown to buy a magic stone for his dead dad. Sure.
Rae being moved by his story and wanting to help him out is fine, I actually even liked it, but — and maybe this is the ace coming out — I could not get a read on her feelings for him. She sees him as a minion, and she his mentor, but she’s also attracted to him. Furthermore, she directly refers to him in her narration as a sociopath.
Next, Rae tries to mend bridges with her stepsister Lia, so she can go to the ball. I — listen, I wanted so much from this relationship. The earliest hook I had in the story was the bond between Rae and Alice, and I wanted to see how that coloured her interactions with Lia, and what this heroine was like. While I got a little bit of this, it was not enough, and I am still starving.
Anyway, Rae attends the ball. There, she and the Cobra create a distraction so he can steal the key off the king. They do this by performing, as far as I can tell, their duet from the musical adaptation of the book series. This should be fun, but a) it’s not very interesting to read a description of a musical number, IMO, and b) we established earlier that the musical wasn’t a thing when Cobra went into the book! Why does he know the musical number! I guess presumably she taught it to him but — why. Why.
And now for a section I’d like to call: I Don’t Understand Marius and Lia’s Relationship. So, Marius and Lia are supposed to meet for the first time at the ball, and he falls in love with her. But also, he heard her crying beautifully through a chimney and that’s how Lady Rahela was implicated in framing her in the first place. Also, when Lia’s dress for the ball gets wrecked, he commissioned her a brand new dress. A woman he has never met and has no attachment to. I will remind you: Marius is not a kind man. He is Lawful but not Good.
I actually think this is maybe a symptom of the bigger problem, which is: I Don’t Understand The Time of Iron Book Series. The story structure doesn’t make any sense to me; sure, I guess in the scheme of things Lady Rahela is a minor villain, but even so, what do you mean her execution takes place before the heroine even meets the hero? Also, Rae’s narration keeps going on about very simplistic ideas of heroes and villains, but the story is also apparently extremely grimdark and Game of Thrones-esque. Hell, even before his apparent descent into morally grey Emperor-hood, the king, in the original version, forces Lady Rahela to dance in red-hot shoes until she dies. That kind of doesn’t sound like a story in which the stalwart heroes are always right. I don’t care what the original story is, that’s kind of immaterial, but I do want to have a good understanding of it so I can understand the themes of this story and what is changing.
So, the Cobra steals the key, and Key has it duplicated. Marius sees this and goes after the Cobra, abandoning Lia. Rae has to go save her from attempted sexual assault, which then becomes an assassination attempt. Lia appeals to the king, Rae is stripped of her “favourite” status (somehow, this did not come earlier), and Rae realizes that Lia is way more manipulative that she realized. Also, the king decides it’s time for the Queen Trials — more on that in a bit.
Marius goes after the Cobra and catches him, throwing the duplicated key in the river. We learn that the Cobra’s a comrade, trying to look out for the poor residents of the city, but also that he pretends to be aloof. The Cobra, knowing he’ll be executed when Marius turns him in, speaks more freely about his background and gives him his real name (Eric). Anyway, Marius doesn’t want him executed, so he lets him go. I actually liked this scene; the Cobra is my favourite character and it’s not close.
Key gets badly whipped for standing up to the king, but he’s fine. Emer overhears Marius telling the king that he’s going to go visit the Oracle to find out what the Cobra and Lady Rae are plotting, but she decides not to tell anyone this after overhearing Rae and the Cobra arguing about whether or not she and Key are people. We also learn that Emer is in love with Lia, and that, when she was serving Lia under Lady Rahela’s orders before betraying her, they had a relationship.
Oh my god, okay, so Rae keeps Key company while he’s recovering from his whipping by telling him stories, including the story of the Velveteen Rabbit. This is so on the nose, while she continues to insist him and the other characters are not real people, that I simply do. not. buy. that she would tell him this story. Which is too bad because I otherwise might think that’s a fun allusion.
There’s a recurring theme about being loved, and I don’t know where to put this, but I liked the bits and pieces we got of it. The idea of the “unloved dead” being discarded, the idea of Rae and Rahela not being the kind of woman people loved (as opposed to Alice and Lia), Key taking from the velveteen rabbit story that “I’ve never known how to be anything someone wanted.” This doesn’t really come to anything, but you know what, I scarfed up the pieces when they came.
The Queen’s Trials aren’t supposed to happen until later in the series, when the Emperor reigns. Rae approaches the king and tries to convince him to reforge his sword, so that he’ll be able to deal with the issues she anticipates. There’s a confusing moment where he says, “You’d betray me if it benefitted you.” She says, “Of course I would.” But then course corrects and says, “How is it betraying you to tell you how to forge an invincible sword?” These are different thoughts!
Key confronts her about being in love with the king but refusing the advances he keeps trying to make. Rae says she’s in love with the Emperor he’ll become, but also that she doesn’t want to be with him knowing that he’s going to be in love with Lia. She says she doesn’t want the king to touch her again, and Key challenges her, telling her that stories can change, that his is rewritten because of her.
At the Queen’s Trials, Rae invites Lia into her and the Cobra’s box, and compliments her on being more interesting than she’d thought, and more conniving. She talks about how Lia must have been the one to cut up her own gown, so she had an excuse not to go to the ball, and therefore not to get shunned by the king (who had to dance first with the northern princess). This is fun except, uh oh, Marius overheard it, and it turns him against Lia. Problematically, he’s supposed to fight for her at the trial.
The trials involve the ladies-in-waiting being set to fight various mystical creatures, for some reason. But they don’t fight, they get a champion to fight for them. What this is supposed to prove, and how, is a mystery to me, and, apparently, also to the author.
Okay here we’re going to take a second to talk about my favourite sideplot, the Nemeths! General Nemeth is the old commander of the armies, and he’s got a bunch of kids: there’s these mean girl twins, one of whom is currently dying of Ghoul Bite Syndrome, who I really liked, and their older brother, who’s obviously flamboyantly gay and who refused to take the family heirloom weapon, which had to be passed to the sisters. Anyway, I like them. General Nemeth is supposed to die because he’s fighting for both his daughters in the trials, but because he now only has to fight for one of them (Ghoul Bite twin got dismissed), he’s able to win and survive.
Anyway, the Cobra tries to manipulate Marius into volunteering for Lia, but before he can, she goes in to fight a manticore on her own. Rae ends up running after her, Emer joins her, and Key throws knives, and they all bring the creature down together. Afterwards, the king appears with his newly forged sword, showing himself off as the destined Emperor.
Afterwards, Lia comes to them, and joins their group (Rae, Emer, Key, and the Cobra). They declare themselves “the vipers” and even make a secret hand movement. I cannot emphasize enough that this did not feel earned and yet I was still having a good time, and in the one right after when Lia, on the king’s arm, makes the viper hand signal at Rae in solidarity.
The last thing Rae wants to do before the flower blooms is to tell the northern princess not to pursue the king, since in the original books this eventually leads to her having a grudge and riding to war. In this, she mentions that the princess’ brother is sick, which leads her to immediately announce she’s going home. It also turns out that she’s fallen for General Nemeth’s flamboyantly gay son, whose father rushes to assure him he’s proud of him and doesn’t need him to marry against his preferences for status. But plot twist! The son is actually bisexual and in love with her too. They ride off happily and I am thrilled, I love this whole “minor characters get to have their own story” moment.
After the party, the king comes to Rae’s chambers and wants to have sex with her. She’s afraid of what will happen if she refuses, but knowing that she doesn’t want this, Key challenges him. It takes a bunch of guards to subdue him (and Emer, who joins the fight), but they do, and the two of them are taken to be whipped to death.
Rae goes to Lia, and they both appeal to the king, from their different perspectives: Rae as the temptress, Lia as the saint. He agrees to spare Emer, but has Key’s throat slit — though not before Rae, as part of the act, tells him he meant nothing to her, and says she lied about being sick as a child. This is the tipping point for Rae where she realizes she does see the others as people.
Emer can’t get over how different Rae is from the Lady Rahela she’s known her whole life, and confronts her about perceived flippancy towards servants. Rae breaks down and kind of admits the whole “from another world” thing, and says that maybe Rahela told Emer she hated her so that Emer could get over her death easier. “If she only loved [the king], it would be too awful. She was nothing to him. Her life and death would mean nothing. I hope she loved you, no matter how badly she showed it. I hope in the end, there was one real thing.” I liked this scene!!!!
Meanwhile, Marius goes to the Oracle and asks to see the truth of the Cobra. He sees the man’s whole backstory, including his upbringing in New York, him getting hit by a car to save a kid, and ending up in Eyam. He returns and gives only part of this information to the king, who is fixated on Rae.
The northern raiders attack, because it turns out the princess’ brother was being poisoned, and she suspects Eyam of doing it. Oops! The king sends men to fight them off, and tells Marius specifically to prove his loyalty by killing the Cobra. While trying to get to the flower, Rae is intercepted by the king, who tells her that he was the one who lured the ghouls and sent the assassins. He tells her he’ll execute Lia in front of her, as an accomplice.
Rae manages to hoodwink the guard left in charge of her, and takes the flower. The portal door appears, but she can’t ultimately leave Lia and the others to their fate, and she takes off, leaving it behind. The flower lasts for a night, so she thinks she might be able to get back in time. Oh, also, ghouls are overrunning the city as well, and Rae pushes the king into the ravine, where he’s supposed to gain the Emperor’s power.
Meanwhile, Marius fights his way to the Cobra, and, instead of killing him, makes the same sacred vow from the beginning of the book to him. They then help a bunch of refugees escape the city, heading to Marius’ estate. The Cobra asks why Marius abandoned his vows to save him, a question I also have, and Marius eventually settles on, “I’m your number one fan,” which is the same thing the Cobra said to him when they first met, and y’know what, this did get me. I am still not bought into Marius as a character or this development, but I am enjoying the implication that him caring about the Cobra broke his worldview in a productive way.
While rushing to save Lia, Rae gives the flower to one of the mean girl twins, and tells her that if she’s not back before morning, she should give it to her ghoul-bitten sister. Then, she convinces Lia to leave the palace with Emer, while she distracts the Emperor, since it’s her that he hates. She says “if I do die, please let it mean something.” This I am here for!
Anyway, then we are back in the scene we started the novel with, the Emperor’s ascendance. Except, plot twist, it’s not the king, it’s Key (and it always has been). Now, I saw this plot twist coming, partially because the king sucked and Key was clearly Secretly Important, and it’s fine, but it’s so silly that Rae didn’t (more on this below). Also, he’s called “key” because he’s the “key to the narrative” and I’m sorry but that’s DUMB.
Key is like partially zombified and some kind of weird undead/godly being and that’s fun, I’m into that. What I don’t understand is her saying that this is worse than the original story. Apparently, even though the Emperor was always from the sounds of it pretty evil and fucked up, her telling him about evil and her scheming getting him killed made him worse than he originally would have been. There’s a line about how he should have had years with Lia to soften him and, hang on, WHAT. This scene explicitly comes near the end of book 1, are you telling me that YEARS pass between the execution of Lady Rahela and whatever else happens in that book —
Okay, god, we’re almost done. Key/the Emperor continues to be obsessed with Rae but also with the idea of being evil. He has the ghouls bring her the dead royals’ throne and makes her sit with him, then echoes something she said earlier, that “evil wins at last.”
THE ACTUAL BAD STUFF
I mean, the biggest issue is that I don’t know enough about the fictional Time of Iron series to really enjoy what we’re doing here, as discussed above. I can’t get the satisfaction from changes to the narrative because I don’t understand enough about what the narrative is or was.
I found the prose occasionally baffling. The book is readable, but good god, at least once every other chapter I had to pause and go, “sorry, what??” and reread a couple of paragraphs to try and understand (with limited success).
Example: one of the things Rae tells the king is “you are not the king’s son” and the narration continues to explain how his mother had given birth to him shortly after marrying the king, with the gossip being that the king was sleeping with her prior to their marriage (and maybe the other ladies-in-waiting too). Okay so is he not the king’s son, or was he just the product of pre-marital sex? Because those are different things. This isn’t important so we never come back to it, and I’ve read the whole goddamn book and I still don’t know what the deal was here, and something like this happened all the time.
There’s also a lot of moments where characters know things they shouldn’t, by my count, be able to know. Marius asks Emer for her name and she instinctively blames the Cobra for his curiosity, and while she’s right, this does not feel justified in the text. Did she read the book??? Hey what’s that over there on the ground, is that the book — Come on.
Let’s talk about Rae’s memory. We’re told she didn’t really start paying attention until the end of Book 1, when the Emperor shows up in all his evil glory, and also that the cancer treatment has made holding onto details hard for her. I don’t hate that, but it means that her memory is suuuper inconsistent and convenient. For example, to prove her “gift of prophecy,” she says, “An envoy from the north will arrive in three seconds.”
This is also why she doesn’t realize that Key is the Emperor until it happens, which is, frankly, hilarious. What do you MEAN you didn’t know your favourite character’s name? Like, I’m not here to police whether or not a fictional character is a “real fan,” but as a story point, it’s completely unbelievable to me that she saw the musical enough times to have the song for a character she didn’t like memorized but did not absorb ANY details about her FAVOURITE CHARACTER.
Furthermore, it doesn’t feel like Rae uses her knowledge of the book series for all that much! I wanted more scheming, I wanted more consideration of character arcs and plot threads for her to pull on.
I also don’t love how much of this book is devoted to what I can only describe as 2012 Tumblr feminism around slut-shaming and “women are people too” discourse. “Having big boobs doesn’t make you evil” is just not a revolutionary statement in 2026 (nor in 2024, when it was published), I’m sorry.
IN CONCLUSION
So I was not having a great time for I’m gonna say the first like 65% of this book, but I did enjoy myself for the last 35%. That doesn’t erase any of the issues I had with earlier stuff, and as mentioned, there’s a lot of stuff I just don’t fully buy and wish it was developed a little bit more. However, I am absolutely going to pick up the next book in the series when it comes due from the library, so, y’know, there’s that.
At the end of the day, some of the scenes worked for me, and I liked some of the characters and some of the exploration of themes, it just didn’t quite do enough for me.
3/5 zombified emperors, I guess!