Portal Fantasies are some of the earliest subset of fantasy novels, going all the way back to the great Lord Dunsany. In those early stories, characters were often transported to a “Fairyland” but over the years, there are other worlds characters can visit. Take Ilona Andrews’s This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me, the first novel of Maggie the Undying. The wife-husband pseudonym of Ilona Gordon and Andrew Gordon take their protagonist Maggie Haley and transport her to City of Kair Toren in Relass, the world of her favorite fantasy novels The Rise of Kair Torren. Two books were published (Thieves of the North and The Lords of the East) before the mysterious author disappeared. Entering the world of your favorite fantasy novels is it isn’t as cozy as one might expect. It turns out life is more grimdark than comfy fantasy: Maggie wakes up in a gutter and only has her knowledge of the events of the books she read as her only proverbial coin for payment.
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.
Maggie soon leans into that knowledge, knowing that she can maybe rob a character who was mentioned only once and discard them, is power. That foreknowledge and her eidetic memory of the books of these novels are valuable coin indeed. This knowledge quickly gets her from literally living in the gutter to being seen as a seer and eventually adopted into a fairly Important Family in the City of Kair Toren. She also learns that death is just a minor inconvenience for her. If she “dies” she soon revives, though not without some pain.
Andrews takes Maggie on a remarkably fun and compelling journey through this world. She knows what’s going to happen, but still has to keep things close to the vest. She can’t tell people this world is not “real” or that from her perspective, it is the fictional world of a series of novels. She quickly gains people’s trust; however, because she has such intimate knowledge of their life and even their thoughts, secrets only those specific people would know.
I appreciate when a story doesn’t waste time questioning itself… or rather, when the characters don’t question the veracity of what’s happening to them. I very much like when the characters understand and believe their situation and immediately try to fix things, so to speak. This might be a strange comparison, but here goes… One of the many things that makes The Conjuring so good in my eyes is the characters believe what is happening to them. They don’t doubt it. Here, Maggie totally buys into and believes her situation – there’s no long guessing game of how “real” what she’s experiencing is. She understands her situation and almost immediately buys into and realizes what she needs to do to survive. There’s something to be said for characters who are competent and intelligent and Maggie emphatically checks off those boxes.
Building on that thought, Maggie sees the “characters” of the books with whom she is interacting as real people. She doesn’t see them as disposable characters. For the most part, aside from that very minor character at the start of this novel. While not time travel, I would say that Maggie knows enough of the events that she realizes tampering with events that happened in the books could have long range effects, and throw of her ability to play with the events she knows. Kind of like Marty McFly pushing his father out of the way of the car driven by Lorraine’s father. Ripple effects, but Maggie is careful to try not to enact too many ripple effects.
Maggie is, of course, the star of this novel. I found myself connecting with her straight-away. After all, haven’t all fantasy readers imagined stepping into the pages of their favorite worlds and interacting with the characters they’ve come to love like close friends and family? So yeah, there’s some fan-service going on (and Andrews doesn’t hide that at all), but the story and the characters go beyond that. Maggie is just … real. Whatever she was before she came to this fantasy world, what she is in this fantasy world is capable.
Another fun element is Maggie discovering the depths of humanity of these characters… these people beyond what she knew of them on the written pages. As she navigates through the world trying to prevent/avoid a major political event that leads to a despot being in charge, Maggie develops strong friendships and connections with the people of Kair Toren far beyond just knowing them as characters on the page. She also realizes how difficult life would be in a pseudo-medieval world, she has to make tough choices, she develops connections to characters, deals with sexism, and has to struggle with the feelings she develops for a character … sorry, a person to whom she should not be so drawn.
In other words, Maggie comes to quickly realize she is living a real life, not a cushioned fantasy, and there are consequences to everything, the reality/mores of the world, and every action.
Ilona Andrews has been extremely prolific for nearly twenty years with acclaim and a devoted readership/fanbase to match. Their Kate Daniels urban fantasy is one of the most respected of the subgenre. To wit, I’ve had them on my radar for quite a while, I’ve been itching to dive into their work. This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me was a perfect entry to their writing, it seemed, which is why I was very pleased when the fine folks at Tor reached out to me asking if I’d be interested in reviewing the book.
The reputation the author team has garnered over the years is very well-earned, at least based on this novel. I’ve already extolled the virtues of Maggie – relatable, smart, she’s “one of us,” real, empathetic. The characters who stick close to Maggie’s orbit (Clover, Solentine, Karis) have a depth that lends a great deal of humanity. But fantasy readers, we dive into these books at least in part because of the magic and the worlds themselves. Rest assured, the world-building is very impressive. The world Maggie enters is immersive and gives the feel of great depth. Like walking out into the ocean, you know you’ve got a way to go, there’s nothing but water on the horizon and you know the farther out you go, the deeper the water gets. I got that feeling with this story… we’re just seeing one part of the world in which Maggie finds herself. Andrews imbues the world with a sense that there’s a lot more than we are seeing.
There was a will-they-won’t-they romance subplot which I found intriguing in how frustrating it was. In other words, an enjoyable stress-inducing relationship. It was teased early, built up tension deliciously and leaves the door open with questions that will hopefully be answered in the second volume. Maybe the only element of the novel that felt a little bit overwrought(?) was the exposition of world building read through Maggie’s thoughts. I don’t think avoiding the “infodump” (I can’t think of another word, but that’s even too negative a word) is possible in a novel like this. Fortunately, Andrews is enough of an eminently skilled storytelling duo that these infodumps were compelling in the way they drew me into the story and how essential they are to grasping Maggie’s place in the story and what she wanted to accomplish.
Another admission: I was also curious how This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me would compare to another recent portal fantasy where the protagonist enters their favorite fantasy book world: Long Live Evil by Sarah Rees Brennan, which was a top 5 fantasy novel in 2024 for me. There was trepidation, I have to admit. However, the trepidation was largely unwarranted. While the two novels/stories share some superficial similarities, they are very different and wonderful stories/novels in their own right.
Andrews has crafted a novel that is a love-letter to fantasy, to readers, and to story. That it doesn’t feel like pure fan-service in that regard is itself an impressive accomplishment. Furthermore, Andrews’s storytelling respects its readers and that, my friends, is what helps to make reading a book like this such a joy.
This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me was an absolute blast and addictive read. At close to 500 pages of relatively small type, this is a thick tome and life got in the way of reading time more than I would have liked, but dammit if I wasn’t addicted to this novel and if I wasn’t glued to the pages when I found time to read it.
Kudos to the eye-catching cover from Andrew Davis, the colors pop and the blue sprayed edges are nice touch.
Yet again, I’ve got another author with a backlist in which I want to take a deep dive!
Highly Recommended
© 2026 Rob H. Bedford
Hardcover | Tor Books
March 2026 | 480 Pages
Review copy courtesy of the publisher, Tor Books
https://ilona-andrews.com/maggie-the-undying-2/
Excerpts: https://reactormag.com/columns/this-kingdom-will-not-kill-me-by-ilona-andrews/
