Everybody Wants to Rule the World Except Me 

• Author: Django Wexler
• Genre: Fantasy
• Publication Date: May 27, 2025
• Publisher: Orbit
• Series: Dark Lord Davi #2

Thank you to Orbit and Oliver Wehner for sending me a copy of this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

The hilarious sequel to How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying by Django Wexler!

Dark Lord Davi rules the kingdom, but she must now break the time loop that binds her in this hilariously bloody conclusion to the Dark Lord Davi duology.

Davi has left the horde behind her, hoping to find a peaceful solution to keep the Kingdom from being destroyed this time. But her plan to guide the Kingdom to peaceful prosperity is thwarted when she finds her usual love interest, Prince Johann, already married and the bloodthirsty Duke Aster running the government. Johann’s new husband is everything Davi is not, but he holds a key to the one mystery she can’t solve – the origins of the time loop that has entrapped her.

With restless armies at her doorstep, Duke Aster reaching for power, and an ancient magician hounding her every turn, Davi must scheme her way to peace and uncover the truth behind her curse if she is to break the spell that binds her once and for all.

I fell in love with the first Dark Lord Davi book, and just couldn’t wait to get my hands on this one. As I was doing my reread of book 1 to refresh my memory, I realized that listening to Davi on audiobook made me realize that it is kind of like hearing my own sarcastic, snippy, irreverent, and nearly always inappropriate thoughts read back to me. Granted, my story involves a lot less fighting, murder, and dark lordliness.

This book takes over where the last book left off, with Davi as head of a horde, defending her new chosen title of Dark Lord Davi. But when things go sideways and the horde decides to kill all the humans, she knows she’s got to try something different to save humankind. 

I read this in audiobook format, narrated by Jeanette Illidge, and she was the perfect choice to voice Davi. She’s got that same sarcastic, usually sexually inappropriate, rambling train of thought, and I doubt anyone could have done as good of a job with this one. 

Davi is a pansexual, pan-species (?) icon. She doesn’t give any thought to differences (like tusks and horns) when it comes to her sexual partners, ranging from humans to Wilders and everything in between. But these hookups aren’t meaningless to her — she genuinely deeply cares for the people she has passing romances with. And with her time loop, these are people she’s been encountering for hundreds of years, even if they have no memory of her. But the relationships she forms are ultimately what makes the story work so well, even if she does come across as a bit of a sexual opportunist. 

One thing that she almost always manages to do is to behave respectfully with those around her, particularly those she leads. She did uphold her duties as a leader, even if her nonviolent wishes towards humanity got a little twisted in translation. Davi’s go-to, dying and starting over with all her knowledge gained intact, seems to be glitching, and she isn’t quite sure how to pursue peace in the right way. And let’s be honest, she’s got a couple of little evil tendencies. But while she actively turned to the dark side in book 1, she’s trying to do the opposite now: be a better leader and promoting peace. Except she also spends a good portion of this book trying to uncover how she was cursed to an unending time loop. In addition, she’s dealing with an evil, power-hungry duke, a relationship, and discovering mind-blowing information towards the end of the book.

Overall, this is a fun, hilarious, and fast-paced romp through one of the funniest books I’ve ever read. A heads up, the book involves a lot of footnotes, and the audiobook just incorporates these immediately, without having to jump around on a page, so if you aren’t a fan of footnotes, this would probably work better in audio format. But if you enjoy a morally gray, pansexual disaster who hops from one fiasco to the next, you’re going to love this duology. 

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