A review by vader
If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio

dark emotional mysterious reflective sad medium-paced

• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

“It seemed that so long as we did it together, our individual sins might be abated. There is no comfort like complicity.”

Do you guys know that feeling when a book leaves you dumbfounded, speechless, astounded, and open-mouthed? When you just can’t believe what you just read. It’s just not possible that that just happened. 

Well, that’s what reading If We Were Villains feels like.

First of all, I’d like to say something: this book is not just for everyone. The plot moves forward pretty slowly, with a writing style that my non-native-english-speaker brain had a hard time processing sometimes. The characters speak half-english, half-Shakespeare. They are all extremelly pretentious, overdramatic, and obsessive theather students enabling each other. So if you don’t see yourself in that description… this might drag a little.

But boy, isn’t it worth it. There’s so much humanity in this novel. Taken, perhaps, to an extreme, yes, but isn’t that the point? Doesn’t that make it so much better? Especially for something that so heavely relies on Shakespeare.

We have a cast of seven main characters, all of them actors made a stereotype of the roles they play. Oliver, the POV character, tells the truth of the story of why he went to prison to an ex-detective that investigated his case 10 years before, something that’s not clear until the very last chapter of the book.

And call me evil, but there’s something hypnotic about seeing all of them fall apart, and the different ways they deal with that. The way it affects their relationships, with each other and outsiders alike. Most importantly, how they get back up.

This, of course, leaves me at the very ending of the book - the very last page, where my whole world came crumbling down, where M. L. Rio destroyed me. An ending that literally haunts me, that I can’t stop thinking about even weeks after I’ve finished reading the novel. An ending that gave back all the stars I would have taken away from my review had the story ended just short of one page.

That last page? That’s what made this a five-star book. It made absolutely every metaphor, every instance of eye-rolling pretentiousness from the characters worth it. It just made this novel whole.

“This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune-often the surfeit of our own behavior-we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars… as if we were villains on necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforc’d obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting-on!”