For the past few weeks, I've seen this novel's chilling cover and heard its intriguing name around TikTok and other platforms. Most people were expressing their desire to read it during the height of fall - aka spooky season - since the novel most certainly passes the "Halloween" vibe check. I'm not much of a mood reader in the sense of reading certain genres or titles during specific months or holiday seasons, so I went ahead and checked out a copy from my local library despite the humid, sweltering hot summer days that seem insistent to reign in terror until the very end of August. Curling up with this book transported me to a very different landscape, the kind of place my autumnal soul and body crave year round. If We Were Villains takes place at the Dellecher Classical Conservatory, a prestigious school of acting and other fine arts in Illinois. The seven main characters - or actors, if you will - have reached their fourth and final year at the institution, having proven to possess grit and talent through surviving three rigorous years. This final year proves to be quite hellish when one of their most gifted classmates dies a horrendous, unexplainable death. Despite the remaining, traumatized six agreeing that their friend's death was an accident, there soon proves to be much more bubbling under the surface of these young men and women's educations, love lives, and hyper fixations on Shakespeare. It is this emphasis on the genius and passion of Shakespeare himself as well as his many works that acts as a motivator for these students even in the wake of gaping death. I love how the students, more brothers and sisters than peers, speak to each other in English as well as disjointed lines from Shakespearean comedies and tragedies, communicating in their own elite, academic sort of way. Literarily, this was a genius move on the author's part, since the undertones of these poetically-charged lines function to display the character's personalities, raw theatrical skills, and subtle foreshadowing of events yet to unfold. Speaking of personalities, each character is intricately crafted and stands on their own. At one point, I was suspicious of every one of them, thinking them possible of murder for one reason or another. And at the next point, I was sure they couldn't have been more innocent. Truly good writing on that part. My favorite scene was definitely the fourth years' immersive performance of Macbeth on the shore of Dellecher's lake on Halloween night. The reminiscence of Dead Poets Society, classic coming of age themes, a brilliantly spooky setting that made me want to leave behind my sunny West Coast home for chillier, muted Midwestern autumns and winters, and undeniable curiosity concerning whether the inciting incident was an accident or a cold-blooded murder all kept me so invested in this book. It was hard to put it down. I think I'll definitely try to reread it one day, knowing how it ends and what to look for that I couldn't have possibly caught the first time. My only real complaint was that Shakespeare is hard to read and really digest without companion guides (at least for me), so some scenes dragged on a bit. The unexpected, shocking ending of the story, complete with a double plot twist that had me terribly sad and then terribly hopeful, is more than enough to power through the slower portions. I definitely recommend staying up until one in the morning to finish it while listening to the Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban score if you'd like to fully immerse yourself in the eeriness of this fantastic book. :)



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Some of my favorite quotes from If We Were Villains:

"Halloween approached like a tiger in the night, with a soft rumble of warning."

"For someone who loved words as much as I did, it was amazing how often they failed me."

"'I don't know, it's like I look at you and suddenly the sonnets make sense. The good ones, anyway.'"

"You can justify anything if you do it poetically enough."

"It's not the whole truth. The whole truth is, I'm in love with him still."

I can't believe I haven't read this amazing book sooner. There's so much to like about the fantastic Faerie world Maas has conjured up that I really don't see any room for arguments concerning a lack of imagination or creativity in this fantasy novel. First of all, it's a loose retelling of Beauty and the Beast, which immediately had my attention and did not disappoint. Secondly, the last hundred or so pages just go absolutely off the rails and send the plot and its main character, Feyre, into scenarios and settings I never could have anticipated. Everything about the aesthetic of the Spring Court, ruled by Tamlin, Feyre's dualistic savior, warden, and lover, is gorgeously written and transported me to an entirely different realm of beauty and splendor. All of the settings, lore, characters, and action scenes are written with the kind of attention to detail I admire and look for that set a book head and shoulders above others that have great plots and characters but lack that extra step of descriptive depth. The element of romance wafting through this novel was deliciously written, lengthening itself out across the pages from enemies to lovers to forbidden lovers, burning slowly and then all at once. I guess this brings me to my only complaint - the spicy scenes. I'm just not the kind of reader that leans towards or specifically looks for books with that extra bit of spice, and this book has certainly been spiced. Even amidst being unaccustomed to those kinds of scenes, I thoroughly enjoyed Feyre and Tamlin's otherworldly attraction and relationship, especially considering how many odds and obstacles seem insistent on obstructing their path towards happiness and peace. I've gotta say - I loved Tamlin almost immediately. He's a fantastic character. I am also so intrigued to see how another interesting High Lord from the Night Court will further play into Feyre's life and potentially stir up some trouble... I'm already trying to get my hands on a copy of the next installment in this five book series, anxious to keep reading and see what is due to happen next. This story really gripped me with its fast-paced plot, extraordinary characters, and message proclaiming love as a superior power over even the most darkest of evils.




Some of my favorite quotes from A Court of Thorns and Roses:

"We need hope, or else we cannot endure."

"Be glad of your human heart, Feyre. Pity those who don't feel anything at all."

"Don't feel bad for one moment about doing what brings you joy."

I think the quote on the cover pictured here is a good place for me to try to sort out my jumble of emotional, tangled thoughts concerning this novel: "A beautiful and wise book... A miracle." This book is beautiful in its setting along the Italian Riviera, in its descriptions of a tranquil, hot, spellbound countryside full of days meant for leisure and contemplation. It's also beautiful in its depiction of how far-reaching, strong, and simultaneously terrifying love, or the notion of loving another person, can be as told through the raw story of Elio and Oliver. This novel is also wise in its endless analogies and comments on the way that humans think and feel and think about how we feel. I felt as if this book wrote itself and was aware of how very metaphysical humans and their bodies and their desires all are when you really try to sit down and understand them. I think what I loved most about this novel was that it was told through seventeen-year-old Elio's perspective, which means that this novel is an eloquent stream-of-consciousness masterpiece. Elio's character and self-awareness are captivating, as they made me as the reader think about how I would try to go about articulating feelings of sexual arousal and unexplainable attraction when I was his age. Elio's is a perspective that made me think about the entire human voice throughout time, how we as a race of loving beings will forever be attempting to articulate how love functions, hurts, flourishes, lives, and dies for as long as we keep existing. Then there's the character of Oliver, who felt simultaneously distant and just a breath away as Elio explored what it would potentially look like to fall head first into the pool of feelings and desires that were practically eating him alive before set free to swim out in the open, whether Oliver returned said feelings or not. It is the very fact that these two young men (though straddling seven years of an age difference between them) did feel the same exhilarating rush of feeling for each other from nearly the moment they laid eyes on each other that makes me sit and think until my head nearly hurts about the nature of two people loving each other. I think, when I look back on this novel and everything about it, I will return to several things. I will return to the question of 'Why these two?' as in, why does it seem like fate decided that these two souls should thirst for each other in such an achingly tangible way that I felt it on every page of the book in my hands? Why not two other people, and why so powerfully? I will return to my realization that having a soulmate - and then impossibly finding it - doesn't necessarily mean that two souls will end up living out their numbered days alongside one another, but rather perhaps incites the possibility of a lifetime of longing for that soul that's never quite close enough when life gets in the way. And I will forever return to the section towards the end of the book where Elio speaks with his father, who has known about him and Oliver nearly since its inception - I'll return to the tears I shed for the way a father softly spoke to his son of grief and love and the importance of letting oneself feel even when it is bound to hurt. The tears I shed for this section and the sections that follow, those sections that end the book and show, in so many words, the two lives Elio and Oliver spend apart whilst continuing to remember each other and the memories of what they did and shared one summer long ago, are tears I shed with a strange mixture of sorrow and happiness. The impact this book has had on me and how I view the neverendingly complex concept of love will speak to how I view intimacy and its beautiful possibilities. How letting someone call you by their name allows the blending of identities and titles until boundaries no longer have to exist and even deeper intimacy can introduce itself. 



Some of my favorite quotes from Call Me By Your Name:

"But it might have started way later than I think without my noticing anything at all."

"I liked how our minds seemed to travel in parallel, how we instantly inferred what words the other was toying with but at the last moment held back."

"Let summer never end, let him never go away, let the music on perpetual replay play on forever, I'm asking for very little, and I swear I'll ask for nothing more."

"'I know nothing, Oliver. Nothing, just nothing.'
'You know more than anyone around here.'
...
'If you only knew how little I know about the things that really matter.'"

"This felt special. Like showing someone your private chapel, your secret haunt, the place where, as with the berm, one comes to be alone, to dream of others. This is where I dreamed of you before you came into my life."

"There they were, the legacy of youth, the two mascots of my life, hunger and fear, watching over me, saying, So many before you have taken the chance and been rewarded, why can't you? No answer. And then it came, as ever deriding me: If not later, Elio, when?"

"I needed him as far away as possible if I was to feel better and forget--but I needed him close by in case this thing took a turn for the worse and there was no one to turn to."

"Perhaps we were friends first and lovers second.
But then perhaps this is what lovers are."

"Fancy this, I might say: at the time I knew Oliver, I still hadn't met so-and-so. Yet life without so-and-so was simply unthinkable."

"'Elio,' I repeated, to say it was I speaking but also to spark our old game and show I'd forgotten nothing. 'It's Oliver,' he said. He had forgotten."

"... I had finally encountered the life that was right for me but had failed to have."

"'And we'll want to call it envy, because to call it regret would break our hearts.'"

"'You are the only person I'd like to say goodbye to when I die, because only then will this thing I call my life make any sense...'"