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whatjackiereads 's review for:
The Betrayals
by Bridget Collins
I received an ARC of this title from the publisher via Edelweiss in exchange for an honest review. This review intends to avoid spoilers, but has been written pre-publication.
4.5/5 stars: ★★★★1/2
"You did one honorable thing and you think that makes everything all right. Love conquers all. But it doesn't."
In a world that is eerily similar to 1930-40s France, including its takeover by the Nazi party, we follow a set of characters through their time at an enigmatic school for teaching young people how to play something called the "grand jeu." This game, based on Herman Hesse's "The Glass Bead Game," is a mysterious mixture of math, art, and performance that is never fully explained but that I as a reader decided to imagine as a kind of performance, in which the person with the most complex and cohesive performance involving as many areas of study as possible wins the Game.
But while the setting and mysterious "grand jeu" that students learn while at the school of Montverre are characters themselves, it is the human characters that this story focuses on most thoroughly and successfully. This is both a mystery and a romance, stretched out over at least a decade, and with twist after twist or, as the title suggests, betrayal after betrayal. The complexity of the plot that these betrayals created, combined with interesting characters and the lyrical writing I fell in love with in Collins' earlier work, "The Binding," made it difficult to put this book down once I got into the meat of it.
This is a multi-layered story of friendship, romance, competition, tradition, modern politics, racial/religious/gender discriminations, and art, and what happens when all of these things collide in a series of oppositional, violent clashes. This story kept me on my toes, always wanting to know more. It left me greedy after every chapter, desperate to consume more of the prose, and the drama, and the twists, but most importantly, the story that tied them all together. I also felt drawn to the seemingly accidental betrayals most of all, and how so many of us are morally grey without even realizing it. That gentle encouragement toward introspection, without Collins ever saying it outright, was relatable to me on a very personal level.
Despite the fact that the winning part of this book is the character dynamic, I will not describe the characters as individuals too much here, as many of their identities intersect in ways too important to the plot. But the lives of Leo, Claire, and everyone else swept up into their world, into their game, created a symphony of emotion and truth. A "grand jeu" all their own, if you will.
4.5/5 stars: ★★★★1/2
"You did one honorable thing and you think that makes everything all right. Love conquers all. But it doesn't."
In a world that is eerily similar to 1930-40s France, including its takeover by the Nazi party, we follow a set of characters through their time at an enigmatic school for teaching young people how to play something called the "grand jeu." This game, based on Herman Hesse's "The Glass Bead Game," is a mysterious mixture of math, art, and performance that is never fully explained but that I as a reader decided to imagine as a kind of performance, in which the person with the most complex and cohesive performance involving as many areas of study as possible wins the Game.
But while the setting and mysterious "grand jeu" that students learn while at the school of Montverre are characters themselves, it is the human characters that this story focuses on most thoroughly and successfully. This is both a mystery and a romance, stretched out over at least a decade, and with twist after twist or, as the title suggests, betrayal after betrayal. The complexity of the plot that these betrayals created, combined with interesting characters and the lyrical writing I fell in love with in Collins' earlier work, "The Binding," made it difficult to put this book down once I got into the meat of it.
This is a multi-layered story of friendship, romance, competition, tradition, modern politics, racial/religious/gender discriminations, and art, and what happens when all of these things collide in a series of oppositional, violent clashes. This story kept me on my toes, always wanting to know more. It left me greedy after every chapter, desperate to consume more of the prose, and the drama, and the twists, but most importantly, the story that tied them all together. I also felt drawn to the seemingly accidental betrayals most of all, and how so many of us are morally grey without even realizing it. That gentle encouragement toward introspection, without Collins ever saying it outright, was relatable to me on a very personal level.
Despite the fact that the winning part of this book is the character dynamic, I will not describe the characters as individuals too much here, as many of their identities intersect in ways too important to the plot. But the lives of Leo, Claire, and everyone else swept up into their world, into their game, created a symphony of emotion and truth. A "grand jeu" all their own, if you will.