If We Were Villains

This was so beautifully written. I actually really loved the ending, as tragic as it was. It's just so very Shakespearean. I do like how it's left, open to interpretation. It makes much more sense that he did indeed kill himself, but I like to pretend it was a happy ending. I normally don't like endings that don't truly wrap things up, but in this case it felt fitting.

My only critique is that the mystery element wasn't so mysterious. That may be more because I read a ton of thrillers, so a twist has to be HUGE for me to not see it coming, but this book was more about the journey than the destination.

-May Swifite Book Club Book

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.

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.

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.

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. 

Well, this did not meet my expectations. Starting this book I felt like this might be a 5 star, but I quickly noticed it would not be the case.

Pacing is very off in my opinion and characters have little development. Characters are only described in their physical aspects and characters such as Richard and Meridith have little to offer besides being handsome people.

The plot of the book was also very predictable in my opinion. The storyline does not move in ages and suddenly explodes in the 5th chapter.

The ending also left me baffled and wasn't really realistic in my opinion. The last chapter felt really rushed. Disappointed writing this.

I was completely blown away by this book that delved into the world of star-crossed lovers and the captivating allure of Gothic architecture. The way it portrayed the intricate details and created an enchanting atmosphere was nothing short of magical. It truly evoked a sense of deep longing and tragic emotions. Even though I hadn't explored Shakespeare's works before, the author's storytelling skills made it accessible and relatable, even for someone like me with limited literary knowledge.

What truly amazed me was the author's incredible use of colours to bring each scene to life. The descriptions of ‘impetuous reds', ‘pea green', ‘metallic purple', and the melancholic yet glowing ‘dull autumnal yellow' were absolutely breathtaking. These vivid hues not only painted a vivid picture but also resonated with the profound emotions in the story. It was a remarkable experience as the author carefully selected words to convey poignant feelings and create a sensitive connection with the reader.

Undoubtedly, the author is a masterful writer who has the ability to capture tragic emotions in a respectful and profound way. Their storytelling left a lasting impact on me, and I aspire to develop my own skills, perhaps through the medium of a paintbrush, to create visual narratives that can captivate and enchant others in a similar manner.

If We Were Villains opens with the main protagonist, Oliver Marks, just about to leave prison after serving a 10 year sentence for murder. The detective who put him there is about to retire, and asks him for answers - did he really do it? What actually happened 10 years ago?

The novel follows a group of theater students at an elite arts college. It is darkly atmospheric, and they don't seem to just act out Shakespeare, they live it, completely immersing themselves at times. Like any tightly woven group of friends, the relationships are complex; family, friends, lovers, enemies. Loyalty, obsession, consequences. These people seem to love each other and ruin each other all at the same time. And of course, you can't have Shakespeare without tragedy, can you? This book is half mystery and half literary homage.

Did I like it? I suspect that if I had been a theatre kid, I would have. It was masterfully written, and I was interested enough in the story to stick to the end to find out ‘who dun it' and see if my suspicions were correct. Although, I will ‘WHAT?!' to that ending? I need at least one more chapter! That WAS an entirely unexpected reveal.

But in the end, it's probably not one I'll keep on my bookshelf. As always though, that's because the atmosphere and setting just weren't to my particular tastes. On a technical and artistic level, I believe this is a very good book, and I suspect it will have a very appreciative audience.

This is a bit of a hard book to rate. Technically, it had some flaws that I couldn't ignore with its pacing, structure, etc. and the characters were generally not likeable, but... despite these I enjoyed it, and certainly more than I expected to at the beginning. If you go into this one throwing realism out of the window and expecting almost a sort of modern Shakespearean drama with all its attendant wild and crazy happenings, you might end up enjoying this one.

Our narrator and protagonist, Oliver Marks, has just been released from prison where he had served 10 years for murder. As he walks out of prison, the sympathetic detective who had arrested him in the first place asks him to tell him the real story of what happened. Oliver reminisces about his time in the Dellecher School a decade ago, and the group of 7 theatre students that he had been intimately part of. Filippa, Wren, Alexander, Richard, James, Meredith, and himself, and how their group, once so close together, slowly came to a climax of tragedy and heartbreak before falling apart.

When I first started this book, I was a little annoyed by how stupid pretentious these students were. They ate, lived, and breathed Shakespeare, to the point of inserting random quotations into their everyday speech when it fit the occasion. It felt like a lite version of The Secret History, a book which I DNFed about a third through and didn't enjoy very much, so I was pretty nervous and apprehensive at the beginning of this one when it gave me a lot of TSH vibes. Luckily though, this eased as the book went on. I'm not sure if I just got used to it or because the drama between the students were a bit more compelling and engaging, or the characters were more interesting to read about. Whatever the case, there was certainly a compulsion for me to keep reading and I finished probably the last 75% of the book at one shot, unable to put it down because I wanted to know what happened.

There are two things to keep in mind here that might make the book go down easier. Firstly, like what present-day Oliver mentions in one of the prologues, on hindsight Dellecher felt more like a cult than a school. It's not obvious when you're reading about it from the perspective of fourth-year-student Oliver, but then again cults never are that obvious when you're in the thick of it. It does also explain some of the more over-the-top moments where it almost felt like Oliver would rather die than leave Dellecher, and would certainly sacrifice any number of his family members to stay. It explains why these ostensibly well-educated, intelligent, and sensitive young adults are willing to put up with so much crap in their time at Dellecher, apparently to become better at their craft of acting.

Secondly, this book is a homage and a love letter to Shakespearean plays, particularly tragic dramas. It's not aiming for realism here. A lot of events that happen, especially in the last 25% are so incredibly unrealistic that I find it pretty clear that the author was deliberately steering away from realism and really indulging in that wild, fantastic endings that Shakespeare is famous for. It's basically a modern-day Shakespearean soap opera. This book demands suspension of disbelief In the same way that one would do so when watching soap operas. If you can get past that, you might actually enjoy it.

Thoughts on the ending: I had actually wondered that perhaps Oliver had been convicted for the the murder of someone else and not Richard, and that we're going to see him murder James at the end, but I was wrong. Some people thought the ending was a little shoehorned in with Oliver and James being gay, but I would disagree with that. There have always been little hints and stuff through the book where you might wonder if you were imagining things and thinking too much, or if you were meant to think that there was something between the two. I did really enjoy the fact that this was building up in the background all along and it finally emerged at the end. I do kinda think that James's possibly faking his own death at the end was a bit unnecessary, but it's just about as unnecessary as, say, a faked-death in Romeo & Juliet. I think the just-missed opportunity at a HEA and the OTT sacrifice from Oliver was Rio paying homage to all these tragic plays where everyone winds up accidentally dead or maligned some way or other.

A mystery thriller that has links to Shakespeare and acting? This immediately had me hooked.

This is actually the first dark academia that I've read and it's sold me on it. The characters are all so intriguing. They each brought something so unique to the story and I found myself struggling to put this book down for even a short period of time.

What I loved most is the feeling of not knowing who to trust, including the characters I grew to love and enjoy whilst reading. It follows Oliver's point of view throughout the story and I couldn't help but not be able to find him a reliable narrator.

It was filled with twists that I never saw coming and constantly left me waiting for the next show to drop. I absolutely love this book.

I don't think I'm going to be able to stop thinking about this book. It's so beautifully tragic. This is definitely a comfort read and I will probably reread again very soon.

I have so many mixed feelings about this one. It has left me with this unsettling sensation of loss after a grand journey of highs and lows. And yet, I think this will be one of those books that I will return to hoping to find comfort. Not gonna delve much further into it because I don't wanna spoil it for anyone. As polarising as it was, I recommend it wholeheartedly.

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.

A group of people who are super duper into Shakespeare is the focus of M. L. Rio's If We Were Villains, which mostly follows seven Shakespearean acting students in their senior year at an exclusive arts college. We know something big and bad happened, because the book opens with one of the seven (Oliver, our protagonist) being released from prison after a decade. He agrees to return to his alma mater and speak to the detective who put him behind bars to finally reveal the true story of what happened all those years ago.

Based on the length of sentence alone, it shouldn't be surprising that what happened was that someone died. The who and the how I'll leave for the reading of it, because the bigger issue is what happened after that person died. The way the remaining members of the group deal with the death, and how it changes their relationships with each other, both on and off the stage. They'd each developed a little niche over their years together (the king, the femme fatale, the good guy, the ingenue, the villain, etc), and the removal of one of the spokes of the wheel renders the structure unstable.

If you've read The Secret History, a lot of that will sound pretty familiar to you. Indeed, it's pretty obvious that Donna Tartt's debut novel was a significant source of inspiration for Rio for her own. And that's fine, Tartt doesn't own the concept of a tight-knit group of students studying an obscure subject at an exclusive private college dealing with the fallout from the death of one of their own. But here's the thing: if you're going to write a book with strong parallels to a novel that's been consistently popular since it was published 25 years ago, you have do it at least as well or better. And although I want to make it clear that I did enjoy reading If We Were Villains (I did love The Secret History, after all), Rio didn't quite hit that mark.

The characters fall a little too neatly into the roles they fill onstage: Richard, the king-type, really is a raging egomaniac; Meredith the femme fatale really is a sexpot; Wren the ingenue really is demure and sweet, etc etc. Where this fails most problematically is that the “background player” types are kind of underdeveloped, and that's Oliver and Filippa. Oliver, you'll remember, is the main character and while it's not unusual for a reader-insert-character protagonist to be kind of bland, Oliver never really captured or held interest for me. Filippa is the only other member of the group that doesn't come from privilege and the small peeks we get at who she is make her easily the most potentially interesting character, and it's frustrating that she's given the short shrift. The plot developments, too, weren't handled especially deftly. I'm generally not good at anticipating plot twists, but I called nearly all of the major ones easily. Rio's prose is solid, though, and I'd definitely be open to reading more from her in the future. I'd recommend this to people who loved The Secret History and want to read something similar, but if you haven't read that book yet, it's better than this one.

“...violence has to come from a place of violent feeling or the audience won't believe it.”

For a genre I rarely read about plays I've never watched/read, this was incredibly engaging. Oliver is part of a group of fourth year drama students who were very good friends, up until they very much weren't. We're taken along with this group as they navigate their final year at Dellecher Classical Conservatory and get to know them as they work on studying for various roles. One of them turns up dead, however, and the group starts to fall apart in dramatic fashion.

I liked the dual viewpoints of this book especially. It's from the point of view of Oliver looking back on events with a detective who worked the case, so we get present day scenes with Oliver and Detective Colbourne and past events with Oliver and his friend group. Oliver was imprisoned for the murder and was just released as the book opens, but did he do it?

The book is a bit of a slow burn, but I appreciated getting to know these students and having them matter to me before the murder occurs. The inclusion of lines from plays and dramas was fitting for the setting, and I thought were really well done and chosen. The ending was almost a miss for me, but the rest of the book was such a trip that anything else was just an incredibly minor point.

I've never been a drama student and don't derive pleasure from Shakespeare, but that didn't stop me from really enjoying this book. Highly recommend if you're looking for a well written character drama/thriller.