Reviews with content warning for Police brutality - If We Were Villains

Reviews tagging 'Police brutality'

If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio

1 review

rainbow_kitten_five's review against another edition

dark mysterious reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

1.0

‘’If We Were Villians’’ is a book that follows Oliver as he explains to a retired police officer the truth about what happened to his deceased friend Richard.

I’d have to say the book sounded fascinating, it was advertised as a queer retelling of Shakespeare and sounded like it could be enjoyable to read, especially since I’m a thespian myself. The truth is I almost stopped reading the book only an hour or two in. The pacing of this book was incredibly slow and I can’t choose a favourite character because every character felt extremely one note. None of the characters felt real, in fact, they felt like cardboard puppets being shoved around violently to each story beat.

The queer rep was horrible, everyone accepted the gay character Alexander but acted repulsed at the idea of James and Oliver being more than friends. All the straight parts of the story about cishet men and women loving each other were very explicit but the supposed queerness of the main character felt nonexistent. The attraction between Oliver and James was not there at all and I hardly believed they were even friends, it was so stubble their relationship that I felt like for most of the book I had been queerbaited.

Even their kiss at the end of the book was described as ‘’almost brotherly’’, the kiss felt passionless and like two straight boys kissing each other.

The entire book we are strung along about Oliver and Jame’s relationship, with the characters constantly dancing around the subject and never expressing that they may like eachother romantically even when asked if they’re more than friends. Despite being inside Oliver’s head, Oliver never seems to be attracted to James sexually or romantically apart from a few forced throwaway lines, yet the book claims Oliver is infatuated with James. We never see this infatuation from either of them despite being told more than one that they were, this obsession or even admiration seems strikingly absent from every corner of this story.

Emotionally this book was lacking it never made me laugh or cry and it was so boring it was a great effort to turn the pages. I couldn’t tell if it was the overly poetic language, the cardboard characters, lack of interesting subplots or the dragging pace but the book was unbelievably slow. The entire first half of the book was just setup,

it was only used to show why the main characters wanted this one character, Richard, dead

. While that is important to set up, it took so long that it made me feel like the entire first half of the book was useless. I felt like my time had been wasted because uptil Richard’s death nothing that imporant happened. Also, the book has long sections were the characters acted out large chunks of plays. It felt as if I was reading Shakesphere’s plays instead of a mystery novel, it was massively dull. Not to forget we alreadly knew that Oliver was going to go to prison so the tenision was missing for the second half of the book and characters weren’t interesting enough to carry the book on their own. I even predicted the exact ending of the book very earlier on and was very disappointed, but not surprised, when I got every part corrected. Maybe the reason this book is slow is because everything is told instead of being shown, yet characters emotions being explained simply to the reader and each act being told in plain details.

The book ‘’If We Were Villians’’ is awful, the only good aspect of this book is that none of the characters are perfect and have flaws, yet the flaws feel as fake as the characters. This book follows unrealtisic characters that act only to aid the plot, has the slowest pace imaginable and the ending seems like the book is trying to shove in your face how great and poetic the author thinks their writing is. Most of this book felt pretentious and boring, I woun’t recommend it to anyone but it’s horriblness was good enough to finish so I rate it one star.

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