This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me by Ilona Andrews is a 480 page first novel in a planned trilogy, published by Tor Books in 2026.

Genre

Fantasy

Description

Outlander meets Game of Thrones in this blockbuster new epic fantasy series from the #1 New York Times bestselling author duo Ilona Andrews.

When Maggie wakes up cold, filthy, and naked in a gutter, it doesn’t take her long to recognize Kair Toren, a city she knows intimately from the pages of the famously unfinished dark fantasy series she’s been obsessively reading and re-reading while waiting years for the final novel.

Her only tools for navigating this gritty world of rival warlords, magic, and mayhem? Her encyclopedic knowledge of the plot, the setting, and the characters’ ambitions and fates. But while she quickly discovers she cannot be killed (though many will try!), the same cannot be said for the living, breathing characters she’s coming to love—a motley band that includes a former lady’s maid, a deadly assassin, various outrageous magical creatures, and a dangerously appealing soldier. Soon, instead of trying to get home, she finds herself enmeshed in the schemes—and attentions—of dueling princes, dukes, and villains, all while trying to save them and the kingdom of Rellas from the way she knows their stories will end: in a cataclysmic war.

Opening Line

Rain drenched the city, cold and relentless.

My Thoughts

The premise of this book was so fun!

Imagine if a fan of the A Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones) series woke up one day IN the fantasy world of the books. Context makes it clear they are in the beginning of the first book, plotwise. They know the key players, they know the events that are to come, and they have the opportunity to try to alter the course of things. They could thwart the major villains and save their favorite characters from terrible fates!

This is what happens to Maggie, but in the world from her own favorite fantasy series. Throw in the fact that any time she dies in Rellas, she comes back to life. The author of her books never finished the series (another parallel to our example books…), and in fact he seems to have fallen off the face of the Earth. What in the world, real or fantasy, is going on here?!

Well, we won’t learn the answer to that question in this first installment, but this is a planned trilogy (hopefully to be completed one day!) On that note, though, be aware that this one does end in a way that will make you wish you had the next book already within your reach.

So this was a great story idea and I had a lot of fun reading it, but I also have to say that this is my first Ilona Andrews book and the writing, friends…well, it’s not great. It’s not terrible, but it’s not great.

One of my biggest gripes here is how they (wife and husband writing team) handle physical descriptions of characters. There are a lot of characters, and when each is first introduced, they are described in full detail in the following order: build, skin color, eye color, hair color, hair style, material and color of each and every visible item of clothing and accessory on their person. One scene featured three men entering a room, and the next four paragraphs are dedicated to listing these things off one by one for each of them. Since this happens ad nauseum, the descriptions themselves got a eyeroll-inducing as well. Three characters have sand colored skin (whichever sand that might be referring to), two with olive skin, one with dark tan skin, one with golden tan skin, one who was naturally pale but had acquired a permanent tan over the years (it doesn’t work that way), brown skin, dark brown skin, rich brown skin, russet skin, even and warm beige skin, beige skin with a peach undertone, and a deeper shade of beige skin with a cool undertone. Yikes.

Apparently Maggie pays very close attention to these details, because at one point she notes a person’s skin, hair, and eye color and immediately knows which character from the books it must be.

Other aspects of the story get infodumpy as well, as something crops up that Maggie already has full knowledge of from reading the story, and so the next few paragraphs will be an explanation of it all, like a character’s background and upbringing and the major events in their life that brought them to the point of their current attempts at political machinations, for example.

The details of the world itself also had me raising my eyebrows a bit, as it’s described as a pretty typical medieval fantasy setting, but has running faucets, lots of different types of paper, and Maggie mentions brushing her teeth (not rubbing them with powder). There’s also something weird about how they use the active voice that I can’t quite put my finger on.

To wrap up my (most major) complaints, it seemed like only one of two authors tried to interject humor in the form of referencing things like Homer Simpson backing into the bushes. Maybe it wasn’t just one of them, maybe they both added it as a reminder that our POV character is from our own modern world, but it only happened sparingly and so really stood out as not matching the overall vibe of the rest of the story. And also, I don’t think they did a great job with the romance in this book. It was very lackluster.

BUT, all that being said, nothing was egregious enough to prevent me from thoroughly enjoying the book! I do think it would benefit from some sort of character guide to reference while reading. I understand there are spoilery reasons why they can’t provide just a list of all characters, but at least something with the Great Families, their key members, and the family’s particular brand of magic would have been very helpful. This is a pretty hefty book, and by the end we saw characters brought up again one or two hundred pages after they were first introduced, and I had not recollection of who they were supposed to be.

Despite these complaints about the writing my final rating was only knocked down to 4.5 stars because I still had a ton of fun reading this story, and likely will read on in the series when the next book becomes available. Hopefully that won’t be too long of a wait!

Note: I started with the audiobook until I got my hands on the hardcover, and felt similarly about the narration as I did the writing technicals: not terrible, but not great either.