Dnf 15%
I couldn’t handle the authorial voice; it’s a lot. Especially when paired with the sentence structure and personality of the main character.

I really liked this. Often neurodivergent stories end up being like serial killers, but this is really effective at depicting how society is constructed for people that conform. What begins as something a bit unsettling ends up being a really effective empathy exercise. For me, it was easier to care about the main character than with many other, more conventional characters. Its quite clever.

Usually short story type collections end up around 3 stars for me, simply because some stories hit and some miss. It’s the nature of the beast, for me. But I found this to be a very tight slice-of-life collection of Toronto, painting an intricate portrait. Each, I think, is necessary to form this sum. So even if some aren’t “my favourite”, more so than other books like this, this met and exceeded my expectations.

Nails the chemistry, intelligent and emotional characterization, and the enemies to lovers trope. Moment to moment this is pretty great.

The strange thing about it is… I feel like the B plots were like red herrings, or something? What happened with the research and the interesting insights about writing, the side characters—basically everything before the tension breaks. There’s some interesting thoughts about grief and guilt and self destructive tendencies, but it all gets pushed to the wayside pretty much.

It’s pretty jarring and, sure, sometimes you forget about it when shit gets steamy and they finally perceive each other after like a Decade of misinterpreting one another.

I think if you’re solely interested in the romance angle it is pretty satisfying. But I thought it’d be also about like cults and all the heavier, interesting little tidbits sprinkled about. It’s certainly entertaining and fulfills the promise of romance. Just don’t threaten me with a cerebral time.

I think I connected with this one a bit more than Beach Read. It’s endearing, in a contemporary-Meg-Ryan-but-for-millennials-kind-of-way. But it was also hard to believe their relationship was ever in jeopardy. There weren’t any curve balls. The chemistry of the two characters are good and I liked that therapy is framed as a positive and necessary thing—especially given that the major obstacle is communication. But I think the major issue I have with these books might actually be not jibing with the narrator for the audiobooks. It’s just hard to connect. I’d have liked this more on the page.

I loved The Secret History so much the comparisons piqued my interest. I can see why people would make them, but think there are fewer similarities than people suggest when they use it as short hand.

This is a story about a tight-knit group of friends whose cornerstone is a subject: theatre, in this case, rather than Greek studies in The Secret History. And one of them is ostensibly murdered, which affects each of them in different ways.

Where Greek tragedy serves as a thematic focal point in TSH, Shakespeare is the cohesive element here. So at first blush the short hand holds up. The experiences differ greatly, however, because Shakespeare is omnipresent. In the mouths of the characters in most scenes, thematically puppeteering their bodies, and policing their dialogue when the former is not occurring. The effect, for me, an (extreme) laymen in regards to Shakespeare, was a difficulty in suspending disbelief.

It’s interesting that the characters inability to express themselves manifests often as the regurgitation of various works. But it’s also thrown into contrast when they are not doing that, and those moments, for me, were the beating heart of the novel. I liked the prose far more when the characters were of their own mind. The specificity of the diction is stellar when this happens. It comes alive far more than when they parrot lines.

But on the flip side, the thematic cohesion Shakespeare plays is very satisfying at the meta level. So I land in a liminal place. Sometimes admiring the cohesion, sometimes resenting the near constant monologues and sonnets, other times, when the themes manifested, marvelling at how fulfilling the setup and execution is.

In the end, I was taken out of the narrative so often by my inability to believe that characters say and act the way they do, even with a first person, somewhat unreliable narration, that it feels opposed to the goals of TSH, which feels hyper realistic. I liked what If We Were Villains is doing, but it’s entertainment comes from its literalization of theatricality. I suppose I found out that this does not translate to the sort of universality I feel with a narrative with characters that make sense to me.

But I did find If We Were Villains to be compelling, consumable, and clever. Highly enjoyable. Certainly recommend it.

It’s too bad my reading goal was met with this one. I really dislike this book. The prose are basic and not engaging; the narration is good and can’t gloss over it, but possibly exposes it. The plot is maybe one of the hardest times I’ve had to suspend disbelief. Mostly because the characters are paper thin, there is no worldbuilding with which to make the overt contrivances opaque. The dialogue is hammy.

The situations are so common place as to basically suggest anyone who hurts you, especially if you’re monogamous and have been cheated on, literally deserves to die. And the sociopathy of is given no scaffolding whatsoever. I’m sure it eventually turns into an OK Good For Her, but I just don’t care. None seem even believably jilted or motivated. The satisfaction is supposed to come when the two characters intersect, I guess? Is that when they become actual characters? Who cares, at that point, halfway into the book? If it wasn’t on audio I’d have quit twice as fast as 40% in. If I ever see a Lee Childs blurb again, I’ll give that book a Miss.

No component of this, I felt, was done well, aside from the pacing. The book is readable and quick. But craft-wise, as with The Silent Patient, this is bad, even by commercial fiction standards.

First of all, the foreshadowing is far too heavy handed. The most viable suspect immediately available is the correct one. The motive is telegraphed in a meeting with some other characters (as well as her own therapy session) early on, yet a revelation later undermines the foreshadowing in favour of a really, really weak motive that is further abstracted as it is entirely offscreen and never characterized. And then, in the end, that original telegraphing I mentioned actually is used to foreshadow the end. It’s bafflingly poorly constructed. Also the red herrings don’t actually work. The strongest answer remains a through-line.

There is major issues with show-don’t-tell, often saying how a character feels, to the point of almost breaking the fourth wall to tell the reader directly. The character work is razor thin. The dialogue is serviceable but not noticeable. Every male character sounds the same as the last. They all even literally display the same mannerisms via our heroines lens. It lacks specificity and active verbs or interesting diction. It contorts what is believable into something that undermines the plot.

The real question is why is this not one star. Two reasons: I did finish it. The popcorn commercial fiction aspect artificially paces it with structure and its so short that it’s easier to see if you are right than put it down. And it is not overtly, actually offensive as The Silent Patient was with mental health and professionals in the field, and I think it’s appropriate to add a star for that.

This book is about so many things within a relatively simple premise and resolution. As a reaction to a heinous act of violence against them, women who have been raped, some many times, by members of their own (separate) Mennonite communities, they hold a secret meeting to discuss what they should do, and what each option truly entails.

A male minute keeper is used to translate for the two groups who speak different languages. This somewhat skews the narrative as it’s peppered with the man’s thoughts, which I think is bold and purposeful, and there to show the lack of agency the women have enjoyed and frustrate the reader similarly. It becomes even more pertinent by the end, though.

In their frequent digressions and interactions the conversation shifts from grief to anger to many different, sometimes unexpected emotions, as they come to grips with what’s happened and what is right and what is Good for them.