clamfish 's review for:

If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio

3.75

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oh my god okay wow. the goods are like SO good and the bads are like bad. but okay the goods first: the initial 10% and the final 10% of this book are just fucking insanity. emphasis on the final 10% because genuinely just wow. my hand like flew to my mouth as i read through the epilogue and the very last line of the book KNOCKED ME DEAD i literally had to stare at the wall for so many minutes just thinking. i think what this book does very well is the unreliable narrator pov and the way every explicitly one dimensional character slowly, inevitably breaks out of their assigned archetype and through that pushes the narrative towards inevitable doom. for a good 80% of the book i couldn't connect with oliver at all, like he felt very wishy-washy to me and felt more like a plot device than an actual character. but then you think about it and you're like oh that IS his archetype he is literally the npc. and then when he finally broke through with his own genuine motivation and became an actual protagonist it almost felt like it was too late, and in a way it was, but also the ending was somehow enough to make up for it. ok but this kind of leads me into the bad which WAS, mainly, that i couldn't connect with oliver and i felt like i was reading like a 4th person pov as opposed to 1st?? some of the characterizations also felt kind of flat to me even though i do recognize that was the intention, but like richard's sudden 180 and meredith like as a whole kind of had me going ??? at times. also this is a me thing because i know there's like a specific audience for this but i found the constant shakespeare quotes SO pretentious and i really don't care abt shakespeare like that so for a lot of the book my eyes were kind of glazing over. also i said that the beginning and the ending were the strong suits which is so true but a lot of the middle was SO draggy and boring to me. but that's just me idk. the ending definitely made up for all of it but yeah. also i predicted the murderer and also the reason why oliver was in jail DKSJHFSKH but like the predictability didn't retract from the emotional moments i think... also i thought the constant bed hopping was a bit exhausting but oh well what can you do. ok that's all i had to say i think wow why did i write an entire essay for this book