Rae's sister is obsessed with a fantasy series involving a Cinderella style heroine loved by all. In this series, both the spoiled king and his loyal best friend fall for her, creating an angst ridden love triangle before she's assassinated. With his queen dead, the king takes up his prophesied role as Emperor with vicious ruthlessness. Rae and her sister argue over which of the two guys are ultimately the better character, but her sister always gets annoyed with Rae because even though she is only 20 years old, she is dying of cancer and often doesn't remember the character names and plot points. No one else visits Rae anymore though, until a stranger offers her the chance to enter the fantasy world in the series to get the Flower of Life and Death to save herself. She doesn't really believe it, until she wakes up pain free in a character's body. Too bad the body belongs to the heroine's evil step-sister, scheduled to be executed in horrible fairy-tale style the next day. There are so many directions this plot could go, but it skips over most of the obvious to create a bazaar and oddly serious look at literary tropes and real human emotions.

I admit that I didn't expect this to be a serious story line dressed up in a ridiculous fantasy trope costume with deep characters and dark feelings. Not that it isn't occasionally ridiculous; the musical dance number comes to mind. Rae has little choice but to lean into the evil harlot persona since everyone assumes she's lying if she doesn't. She already learned some hard lessons about how people in the real world so it shouldn't be that different, right? Except the harlot thing, that is. So Rae schemes to get access to the flower when it blooms and firmly insists to herself that these people aren't real and don't matter. If that's true, why does she go to such effort to get everyone back on track after her plans throw the whole plot into a blender? This is really a story about how each of the characters, including Rae herself, became the adult they are and the psychological baggage they struggle with. After all, this was a book series more about revenge and unhappy endings than anything else. 

Long Live Evil is certainly different and overall it's a good different.