All Hail Chaos is a phenomenal sequel to one of my favorite books. I adored Long Live Evil and so I had high hopes for this one. And they were absolutely fulfilled and thrown off a cliff in how much I loved them. Keep reading this book review of All Hail Chaos for my full thoughts.
Summary
Rae is a fantasy reader who’s been transported to her favourite fictional world of swords and sorcery, castles and monsters. Playing the villainess, she thought she could change the narrative, but this version of the plot is far much more deadly than the one she knew.
Her friends are on the run: the Cobra shelters in an eerie manor haunted by dark secrets, while Emer and Lia stoke a revolution in the gutters. Undead armies roam the kingdom, raiders camp at the city gates, and the irresistible emperor – Rae’s favourite character ever, now possibly the greatest monster in the land – wants her to be his evil queen.
What’s a villainess to do? It’s time for wicked bargains and fake engagements, in a fantasy where the most dangerous thing you can do is believe in someone.
Review
(Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher. This has not impacted my review which is unbiased and honest.)
You know when you expect a book to be brilliant and it’s even better? That was me and All Hail Chaos. It had humongous shoes to fill with Long Live Evil and it did. It’s unique, inventive, and still meta without falling into second book sequel. In fact, it knows it’s a sequel and knows it’s time to be bold and make unique and big choices. There are these ripples set in motion from Long Live Evil, but also all the choices they made. And can we really live with ourselves now that these characters have become people to us? That we see the results of our actions on these people who have become three dimensional to us?
Seeing from other perspectives made All Hail Chaos even better as they take shape in front of us. And what really tugged at my heartstrings was the way All Hail Chaos examines the idea of villanhood and love. Because Rae has always been a dark horse and loved the villain, to know that someone could be monstrous and loved. And yet she feels that she cannot be loved and someone else has to be the hero. So all of All Hail Chaos is her breaking her own heart for the plot. For knowing that she cannot be the one to make this story right, to be the hero, even though she loves so hard. Furthermore it’s this metaphor to how unloved, lonely, and ‘difficult’ she has felt her life.
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Her life of inconvenient sickness, of having to hold it all together. All Hail Chaos is a story of revolution. The idea that the villain could be loved, that this is the key to being a hero. And the idea that anyone could be powerful. It broke my heart in the best of ways. Rae is the clever and reckless heroine of my heart who really explores how “every story is a tragedy, if it goes on for long enough…you either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become a villain”. Find All Hail Chaos on Goodreads, Storygraph, Blackwells, & Libro. fm.