“It’s hard for me to think of the characters around us as real people. Do you understand? Are you like me?”
[his] grey eyes went eagerly bright, silver as a magic blade. “I think so.”
Rae grasped his arm. “You walked into the book too?”
“Sorry...What book?” His face was blank as a page with no story on it yet.
Rae sagged. “Ah. You’re a sociopath. My bad.” [p. 170]
Rae and her younger sister Alice are massive fans of the 'Time of Iron' fantasy book series, described as 'grim and also dark. The series title might as well be Holy Shit, Basically Everybody Dies'. Rae, who's twenty, is dying of cancer: Alice sits and reads to her from the books, and Rae doesn't want to admit how much of the detail she's forgotten. Which becomes considerably more of a problem when, following a late-night visit from a mysterious woman, she's inserted into the story -- in the body of the villainous-yet-beautiful Rahela Domitia, the 'Beauty Dipped in Blood', who's due to be gruesomely executed the next day.
Rae embraces her new life with glee; 'foresees' some plot developments (''you will be powerful A.F.' The king’s brow wrinkled. 'A.F.?' 'As foretold,' Rae intoned hastily'); encounters some of the vivid characters of this world (I especially liked the Golden Cobra, who's extravagantly rakish and has a most intriguing backstory), and revels in villainy. Is she changing the story, or is it changing her? And has she forgotten something important about the plot?
Rae is sometimes annoying, and I found her cavalier dismissal of other characters as 'not people' rather disturbing: but I loved how the plot deepened (and possibly also thickened) around her, and the other characters' perceptions of her. (This is not a single-narrator work.) Rees Brennan grounds the story in popular culture: Rae is 'burdened with glorious purpose'; the Cobra's 'so vain, he probably thinks the troubadours' songs are about him'; Rae is 'misled by ambiguities in the text' when she discovers that the Cobra and Marius aren't a couple, despite all the fanfic and fanart. There are some interesting observations on art and life, on stories and reality, on what makes a story -- or a character -- satisfying or otherwise.
And, despite seeing it coming well before Rae did, I found the ending a real shock. Next book in the series is due in September...
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