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

4.0

A compelling and dramatic unravelling of youth, sanity and relationships as the boundaries between character and self blur under the weight of trauma and escapism. There were many points where I though this book could become cheesy, it certainly dipped its toes in at points. However, there was a unapologetic and matter-of-fact tone to the way that M.L. Rio presented deliberately melodramatic events and descriptions that made it more often than not satisfying rather than cringeworthy. This is an exploration of drama students more or less isolated from everything outside the plays they are studying and the time they spend together and how this effects their responsed to trauma and tragedy. As a result, the coating of pretentious reference becomes a red-flag of stokholm syndrome where the captor is the characters they can't quite separate from themselves. They emote grandly as a way of escaping the things they don't quite know how to process anymore and the unfolding of their lives in such a heightened way, forever entangled with Shakespearean prose, read as multi-dimensional identity crisis.

The one thing that did draw me out of this, however, was the feeling of slight disconnect between the characters ages and their actions. I'm not sure if this is simply a facet of the way that US Colleges work, but every time the main characters were listed as 20-somethings I got a slight jolt of disbelief. The environment they were in, the ways that they behaved and the lens presented to us by Oliver often felt a lot more like that of 16/17 year olds.