Friends, I feel like this is a book that won’t be for everyone, but if it is for you then you will love it with the sum of your being. This was perfection for me, and completely made my October this year. If you’re looking for something haunting, and thrilling, and so very atmospheric, then please give If We Were Villains a try. And that last line? It is going to haunt me forever with its beautiful perfection. if we were villains is a masterpiece crafted from the worst and deepest of our human afflictions. slowly watching each character spiral downward due to their own desire, secrets, heartache, and passion was so painful. it was also beautiful, in a devastating way. And you know what, this book would have been a five no matter how it ended, but the ending made me screech out loud. So there’s that. Oliver Marks has just served ten years for the murder of one of his closest friends – a murder he may or may not have committed. On the day he’s released, he’s greeted by the detective who put him in prison. Detective Colborne is retiring, but before he does, he wants to know what really happened ten years ago. here’s some advice if you are intimidated by this book like i was: (i literally put this book off for years.)✨

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But these are the only (somewhat) positive things I have to say about this book: it's very accessible from the get go, the characters are easy to love (and hate) and the building climax to the inevitable murder is thrilling. Sadly, this is also where the downfall of this novel lies. For someone who has a masters in Shakespeare Studies, M.L. Rio sure as hell doesn't know how to structure her novel/play properly. If there is one thing she should've learned by studying Shakespeare so meticulously, it is that you do not place the murder in the second act, especially if that's the only big upset of the whole plot.Which of us could say we were more sinned against than sinning? We were so easily manipulated - confusion made a masterpiece of us.” I mean, how couldn’t I? I am a natural-born drama queen, I feed on theatrical stuff like this, do you expect me not to fell in love with a bunch of college kids aspiring to become actors? This book talks about love, either desperate, hopeless, mad or even platonic love. Impossible love. It talks about sacrifice and whatever it is that leads one to do it. It talks about the fine line that stands between real and not real in the life of troubled, artistic and wild souls. Many readers including Cynthia d'Aprix Sweeney, the writer of The Nest, compared this novel to Donna Tartt's The Secret History. This is such a good book; I’ve been obsessed with it for at least a week straight and even though I felt the urge to devour it, I didn’t want it to end so fast so I had to slow down and enjoy. You know what happened when I did that? I truly enjoyed it.

If We Were Villains: Full Book Analysis | SparkNotes If We Were Villains: Full Book Analysis | SparkNotes

In the end, it doesn’t matter you enjoy the drama, because everything turns into a careful tragic masterpiece with no chance of changing its ending.

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The title of M. L. Rio’s debut novel, If We Were Villains (2017), is borrowed from William Shakespeare’s King Lear, the final play the fourth-year acting students perform before Oliver Marks confesses to a crime he did not commit. In King Lear, the full line suggests that excess (“surfeits of our own behavior”) leads to disasters that people will try to blame on others. In Shakespeare, the Sun, Moon, and stars are “made guilty” as a result. The novel approaches the problem of excess and potential (‘if’) villainy differently, denying even the possibility of guilt. When the group agrees to not save their grievously injured classmate, they never ask whether this decision will make them guilty of murder, focusing instead on how it would benefit them if this abusive bully were not to be alive, and in the novel the attempt to escape responsibility wreaks havoc. Over the course of the novel’s five “acts,” the group will grapple with this conditional phrase, wondering what it means to understand themselves as villains in the drama they together enact. If We Were Villains is the story of a tightly knit group of seven lyric-mad Shakespearean thespians who seem to prefer each other’s company to anyone else’s, thereby offending the rest of the world. But as these things so often go, something dark and sinister soon sews hatred in them, and wedges its way between them. The friendship, once beautiful, begins to hold something worth fearing. At some point, our merry band of thespians become less friends and more things for each other to hit.