I was really hoping this would be a new favourite for me, but it never quite came together for me. The premise and the world have a lot of potential, but it never felt fully realised. I spent most of the book waiting for the story to decide what it wanted to be, and that never really happened.

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The Betrayals is set in a university called Montverre which is centred around the annual grand jeu, a game in which centres round a musical composition, but also includes poetry and mathematics. (The exact nature of the game is never made clear). It reads like a dark academia fantasy setting, and it was very atmospheric, but there was no actual fantasy element and no clear location or time period for the university (I felt early twentieth century Britain/France? But I could be wrong) so it didn’t feel particularly grounded. All we know is that the land its in is run by a single political party who persecute Christians – and again, this was never really explored or explained.

We follow the story through four perspectives. The first is Claire Dryden, the first ever female Magister of Montverre. We then have Léo Martin, a disgraced politician who has essentially been exiled back to Montverre. Sometimes we read in third person from his perspective, and sometimes we read his journal from when he was a student. The journal was the most compelling of all the narratives, setting the scene for the driving force of the book: the mystery of how Léo and Claire’s stories intertwine. Finally we had the Rat, a young woman who lives in the attic of Montverre.

The Rat is the first character we meet, but her fairly limited character arc doesn’t interact with Claire and Léo’s until briefly at the very end. Even though she did have an impact on the overall plot, she still felt superfluous, and it would have been nice to have more integration of her storyline with the main characters’.

The book is driven by Claire, Léo, and Léo’s past, but even the resolution of that story felt unsatisfying. The twist at the end of the book is fairly easy to guess, but then you get so much extra information thrown at you that directly flies in the face of it that when you do get to the twist it feels a little wasted. Without spoiling anything, what should have been a very emotionally charged reunion fell flat.

The Binding was one of my favourite books I read last year, and I was really hoping that The Betrayals would be up there this year. There was so much so love: a dark academia setting, a mysterious game, two strangers who seem to have an intertwined past, a servant girl who haunts the corridors at night. Perhaps Goodreads tags have a lot to answer for: if it didn’t say ‘fantasy’ in big letters at the side perhaps I would be less disappointed, on that count at least. Either way, none of the individual elements of this story – so good in the premise – actually delivered.