If We Were Villains
Ratings449
Average rating4
As a theater kid myself this was both a familiar story (the sense of family between a cast, passion, roles mixing with reality) and at the same time completely and utterly darker and twisted than anything that would happen in my theater (we do not go about murdering each other on the regular). Beautiful writing and as a Shakespeare adorer myself, I thoroughly enjoyed this novel. Can't wait for more by M.L. Rio
I thought the book was good, but extra star for how great the audio narration was. Bc I was listening to it, the frequent transitions between Shakespeare quotes and normal speaking flowed really well. I also speak enough work jargon outside of work that I really have no right to complain.
It's definitely Dark Academia and I'd argue more character fiction than suspense (the cast is so small, hard not to figure it out).
I totally did not realize this was set in the 90s until there was a mention of a payphone at the end. Most of my complaints were resolved with that realization lol.
Colleges that do the whole “kick people out at the end of every year bc they aren't good enough” are dumb; be a better teacher if you think they suck.
I was not prepared for how much literal Shakespeare was in this book. The characters speak in quotes. I didn't love that. Also I felt like the ending was a little anticlimactic, and I wished the LGBTQ element was more overt.
4.25 stars
“You can't quantify humanity. You can't measure it—not the way you mean to. People are passionate and flawed and fallible. They make mistakes. Their memories fade. Their eyes deceive them.”
A book that kept getting better and better, If We We're Villains is beautifully written! My star rating choice went from 3.75 to 4 as I continued reading, and the ending was gripping enough to raise that to 4.25.
In the beginning, I honestly didn't love this book. The cha
What a journey this book was. When the prologue started I was hesitant, but it was amazing. The scene performed merged amazingly with the situations and the emotions of the character I often didn't know if that was how the scene was actually supposed to go. If I have been a theatre person I might have enjoyed this even more but I know for a fact I missed no nuances at all, even without that knowledge.
The ending was amazingly beautiful. Even though it ended sort of openly it also totally didn't. Everything about these characters and the way they interact with each other and in the story was amazing. I loved the hell out of it.
really, really entertaining read!!! I had fun reading this and the little Shakespeare snippets were so lovely.
4.2 ! Really enjoyed this story and the audio. I'm not too into Shakespeare so I couldn't relate much in that regard but overall I enjoyed the theme. Very nice addition to a spooky read in October ^-^
It wouldn't normally do to compare two novels simply because they shared a similar premise, to then disparage the one you liked least – unless of course it's this book, because If We Were Villains is an obvious attempt to recast The Secret History (one of my favourite novels), under the Globe's limelight. So compare, I shall.
Stylistically speaking, this is a YA novel. Both in tone and characterisation. And that's it, that's why I gave it 2/5. Not because YA is bad per se, but because this novel could have been so much more if the tone and characterisation had just been more mature.
The bulk of the group's dialogue with each other is straightforward, petulant, foul-mouthed, typically lacking any sensitivity, or worse, artistry. Unsurprisingly, this is how teenagers are meant to talk; uncouth and unattractive. The use of quotations improved the tone but it rarely felt like a decision made by the characters themselves – never felt Alex or James, but rather M L Rio who wanted to insert the quote.
Which is partly because they never really make it off the page as anything more than thinly personified tropes – tropes that Rio neatly defines for us at the start of the novel, but tropes none-the-less. This lack of characterisation might have been a deliberate choice; as in Shakespeare, the archetypes play archetypal roles. But here, as agents in a novel, that shallowness makes it difficult for my interest to find any grip in the plot beyond the murder mystery itself.
And it is precisely because of tone and characterisation that this novel isn't able to claim a pedestal place by the Secret History. Despite so much of the same set pieces, it is Tart's impressive characterisation and her richly educated tone that make the Secret History so enjoyable. And whilst If We Were Villains wasn't ~not~ enjoyable, it was certainly not impressive in the ways it seemed to wish it could be.
this book fucking tore me apart. i felt like i was slowly going crazy with james and oliver. they were so obviously queer from the very start and it PAINED me. i'd say the story isn't entirely on their love, but it's the one thing that you'd remember from it. when oliver said it “transcends any notion of gender” i thought it was so beautiful. they had a love so strong; everyone knew what oliver would be willing to do for him, which is why fillipa didn't tell him. and i think that's so scary yet beautiful in the sense that oliver would do anything for james, anything in the world. i hate books like this because they fucking destroy me. this book specifically focuses on a murder which eventually makes everyone spiral out of control. can i just say i hated wren and james ??? like as a couple. they were awful. everything felt forced as fuck. at least meredith and oliver felt real, even if it wasn't entirely. i love the quote “do you blame shakespeare for any of it?” and oliver replies with, “i blame him for all of it” because despite everything, this book lives and breathes shakespeare, and he's a very crucial theme in the book. i find it so eerily fascinating that they can talk exclusively in shakespeare quotes, and i think a lot of his quotes contributes to the emotions of the scene. i also really loved the parts where they'd be acting, yet oliver would take the words seriously, as if the other person was directly saying that to him. and it almost felt ironic how every shakespeare line they said was relatable to the situation they were in. it made it feel like the line between acting and real life was blurred. lastly, the end broke me. oliver saying, “the whole truth is that i'm in love with him still.” i think it's so fucking heartbreaking that they never got to say those words to each other. it's so heartbreaking that everyone knew, including them, how they felt, yet they never said anything. it just broke me that they could never be who they wanted to be.
This is one of the books (like for me the Picture of Dorian Gray) in that I couldn't highlight anything specific because the entire book is an experience. I really really loved every part of it. The characters, the plot, the writing, absolutely everything.
Shit, now I'm mad about this.Maybe it's the Shakespeare thing. Not the fact that this book has a significant amount of text and quotes from Shakespeare's work, or that big blocks are dedicated to the characters' performing said works, but rather how Shakespeare perhaps informed the structure of this novel. I don't really know, it's been a long time since I analyzed Shakespeare, and I was never particularly good at it. But I have learned - not from school, but from a Tumblr post - that Shakespeare's tragedies are marked by a protagonist that is made for a different kind of story than the one he is in. If Hamlet was in Othello's situation, he would have carefully analyzed things before jumping to conclusions and there would be no play; and if Othello was in Hamlet's, he would have just killed Claudius in the first act, and once again there would be no play. In M.L. Rio's If We Were Villains, there is in fact someone who finds himself playing the wrong role in the wrong story. It's not the main character though. And like many of Shakespeare's tragedies, its less about creating a satisfying conclusion and character arc, and more about just watching things slowly tumble down hill until they crash to the bottom. Fun.If We Were Villains is a story told by Oliver, a man who has spent the last ten years in prison for the death of one of his classmates at the highly selective and high pressure school of Dellecher Classical Conservatory, where they eat, breathe and sleep nothing but Shakespeare. He tells this story to the detective that supposedly “solved” the case, relaying the weird dynamics of a bunch of pretentious theater kids who may or may not have killed someone. The conceit of relaying a tale in such a way is very classic mystery, but I found myself wondering by the end of it whether Detective Colborne said to himself, “Huh. Yeah, I probably should have been able to figure that out myself. Cool, this was a waste of an afternoon.” I give this book marks for atmosphere and prose. It wasn't as lush as I would hope for something like this, but Rio was fully committed to the vibe. The descriptions of the performances are probably some of the book's coolest and most vibrant moments. But it's the characters that fall dead for me. All seven senior Dellecher acting students are introduced as archetypes - the hero, the whore, the villain, the king, the nobody. I don't think its remarkable that I found this extremely annoying right off the bat, but I expected Rio to subvert it. I kept waiting for her to do just that. But aside from a single comment from Meredith about three quarters into the book about being labeled the sexy one, no one seems to bother. I found myself reading in disbelief that I was just supposed to take at face value everything I was told these characters were, rather than what I was shown they were. I was so mad that the story takes for granted the kind of societal programming that comes with labeling Meredith the whore, or that I was supposed to understand what was so loveable about James just because he has a hero's face. And of course the faceless one is our protagonist, Oliver - the unexceptional one who attaches himself to someone more beautiful, and becomes what the people around him need him to be. That might be my least favorite character trope.No one ever did anything that surprised me. Or excited me. Hell, the guy who gets himself killed at the beginning is probably the most exciting part of this book, and we never really know what was driving him to act the way he was. Again, the story leans heavily on the role he is assigned - the arrogant king. And despite the amount of supposed queerness (thanks, by the way, for assigning the only openly queer character as the “scary” one), this felt deeply heterosexual. Like in a way that is almost hard to describe as a queer person. I know if I had read this as a teenager I would have swooned over James and Oliver's deeply repressed love for each other, so desperate I was to have something outside of the heterosexual paradigm. Now as an adult who has to spend a lot of mental energy undoing comphet programming, I am so very over it. I feel like this book regresses queer rep a solid twenty years. Yeah, you know what, I'm too mad about this to give this anything above one star. For a while, about mid way through I was debating between a two and a three. Before I sat down to write this I was pretty convinced of two. But no. I'm not sure why people like this so much, I guess if you're a hardcore lit nerd who loves Shakespeare but somehow has not read a single thing with a queer character since [b:The Secret History 29044 The Secret History Donna Tartt https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1451554846l/29044.SY75.jpg 221359] (that's not a knock, I loved that book, I still love that book, but it is largely of its time), then have at it. But for the rest, there are much better, much gayer, dark academia books out there.
Not sure what to make of this. I can see how influenced this book was by the secret history but it failed to deliver what i liked about this genre.
Book #1 of 2020
This story follows a group of Shakespeare students at college who are utterly immersed in the bards work. The story unravels, tensions in the group rise and one student is found dead, under suspicious circumstances.
This book was absolutely fantastic although quite dark. I absolutely had to know what happened and the book continued to involve and surprise me to the very end. It has been compared to the secret history and although I do see the comparisons I feel it stands on its own merits regardless.
This has to be one of the most well written books I've ever read. It's far too good. I don't have the words to describe it. Read at your own peril, people.
I was never a theater kid, so half this book bored me immensely instead of – as I suppose was the intent – making me gasp at the author's genius for including certain plays and pages of dialogue. And I do mean PAGES and PAGES of dialogue from Shakespeare's plays. Also, the characters don't come across as sparkling and witty; they come across as horribly pretentious and off-putting. The author loved to harp on and on about how “close” their friendships were, but their relationships with each other looked so shallow.
Around the 35% mark, I realized why the story started with establishing the fact that someone was killed and someone who'd been in prison for it may not have been the real villain: because the book is incredibly DULL, and if it wasn't for those two tidbits, then I (and many other people, I'm thinking) would have stopped reading.
I pushed myself on after again feeling the urge to DNF this crap at around 50% but I wanted to see if all the things I thought were correct, and yep, they were. I knew who the victim would be, I knew who the guilty person was, I knew why people did what they did, etc. etc. These conclusions were drawn way, way, way before the 50% mark and I was thinking the entire time, “No, this can't be it. The victim can't truly be the victim ... and the obvious guilty party can't truly be the one who did it, right? There's going to be a twist. Some cool turn coming, surely?” Nope. Didn't happen. I was imagining all sorts of cool stuff that could raise the level of this book. More crimes, more cunning, something more? Nope. Boring and disappointing.
tw: murder, alcoholism, drug abuse
yeah i probably would've enjoyed this more if i didn't hate shakespeare and find all of the weird quotes and uppity thespian judgements that the narrator makes so mcfreakin' annoying. listened to audiobook, so it's likely that affected my enjoyment as well.
wholly predictable, but interesting to see the fallout of a death of a student in a tight-knit weird society friend group outside of the secret history.
