Book Review: “If We Were Villains” by M.L. Rio

Hello!

June was a surprisingly good month for my books. I thought I would be about to get through three to four books, but I guess I was reading a lot faster than I originally thought and I managed to finally hit 25 books as we neared the end of it.

When “If We Were Villains” first came out, I was unsure if I’d really be interested in it. I was intrigued by the suspenseful mood but having a big chunk of it built around Shakespeare made me worry since I’ve always had trouble understanding the meaning of what everyone was saying, like most would, but then again, I’m always searching for something like Victoria Helen Stone’s “Jane Doe” and I will admit this book isn’t anywhere near in that direction, but I liked it just as much though.

---

Oliver Marks has just served ten years in jail – for a murder he may or may not have committed. On the day he’s released, he’s greeted by the man who put him in prison. Detective Colborne is retiring, but before he does, he wants to know what really happened a decade ago.

As one of seven young actors studying Shakespeare at an elite arts college, Oliver and his friends play the same roles onstage and off: hero, villain, tyrant, temptress, ingenue, extra. But when the casting changes, and the secondary characters usurp the stars, the plays spill dangerously over into life, and one of them is found dead. The rest face their greatest acting challenge yet: convincing the police, and themselves, that they are blameless.

taken from Goodreads.

---

As the reader, you get to hear both the events that happened in 1999 to a group of students. Four boys and three girls, as they study theatre in college. Everything starts up like it does every day, but then they get their individual requirements for the Halloween show and something changes within the group itself. One character ends up dead and everyone is trying to go on about life, while in the back of their minds, they try to solve who actually killed their friend.

It was just us—the seven of us and the trees and the sky and the lake and the moon and, of course, Shakespeare.

Honestly, it’s a very cliche of “who done it” style of book but I will say it also had a very unique layout. The fact that the author included many Shakespeare references throughout was interesting to me! I got to see how the characters live and breathed William Shakespeare’s plays on a daily basis. You could see each of them act out various characters – sadly I was more focused on how these people would bring them to life as if I could see the show in front of me, and this was a wonderful display of elements. I still had some issues with the dialogue of that time’s way of speaking. I made it through in one piece, but I doubt I will read anything like that for a while. Thanks to this book, I have put both “Macbeth” and “King Lear” on my TBR list!

My true issue was once you made it passed the events that happen after Halloween, everything became very boring, it didn’t pick back up under the final Act, which for a while I wondered if it was worth finishing because it was that bad for me! As I suffered through this section, I tried to figure out who could play each of the characters…

I started hunting when I first started reading but I was thinking of various other actors, and I went with Jamie Campbell Bower as Alexander, Camila Mendes as Filippa, Emilia Clarke as Wren and Sam Claflin as our main Oliver, although I did end up changing my mind toward the end of the story, but I don’t know who the person I saw at that point. Honestly, this was a difficult thing to do because I rarely see a person’s actual face when creating the character’s features, so I could have all of the descriptions an author can give me, and I could still have problems forming them.

Have you read “If We Were Villains” by M.L. Rio yet? If you have, what were your thoughts on it? I’d also like to know who you saw for the important characters down in the comments too.

Book Review: “Jane Doe” by Victoria Helen Stone

Howdy!

So, this week is all about reviews. I had two other plans for what I could talk about for today, but I just decided to scrap them and give you this one to round up a very busy time for books!

This month, I was able to enjoy some Prime Reading and as much as I had hoped that Margaret Atwood’s sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale would still be listed on the site as part of the choices you can read, it wasn’t so I had to find something else and as I scrolled through all of these books, I finally saw a familiar cover. Before we continue though, I have to mention that I am not really into suspense thrillers in both books and films. I have watched What Lies Beneath, Escape Room, and Play Or Die recently and really enjoyed them but I never finished Paula Hawkins’s The Girl On The Train so I was a bit hesitant but once  I read the description of the story, I instantly hooked!

---

A double life with a single purpose: revenge.

Jane’s days at a Midwest insurance company are perfectly ordinary. She blends in well, unremarkably pretty in her floral-print dresses and extra efficient at her low-level job. She’s just the kind of woman middle manager Steven Hepsworth likes—meek, insecure, and willing to defer to a man. No one has any idea who Jane really is. Least of all Steven.

But plain Jane is hiding something. And Steven’s bringing out the worst in her.

Nothing can distract Jane from going straight for his heart: allowing herself to be seduced into Steven’s bed, to insinuate herself into his career and his family, and to expose all his dirty secrets. It’s time for Jane to dig out everything that matters to Steven. So she can take it all away.

Just as he did to her.

taken from Goodreads

---

So, I started reading this book, knowing that there would a big chance that I could be wrong and I would hate this, but thankfully I didn’t!

I was actually flying through it because I was loving the main character Jane. She explains everything from her childhood to how she basically self-diagnosed herself as a sociopath. I love watching some true crime shows on Investigative Discovery and it was interesting to see how her mind worked. I love to observe people and learning how to read their body language but this goes all in and it was so addicting! She also talks you through her reasons why she wants revenge on this guy, and this is where you really see this side of her really start to unfold, because she’s very honest about everything. I like that fact she isn’t a whiz at everything, like she says in the book, she can’t break into safes and vaults.

There are some strong religious views; a man has more authority, he owns everything and the only thing the women are suppose to do is be there for him and take care of the children and their home. A man can be forgiven by the Lord with little to no punishment whereas a woman has to pay for her sins automatically. I know there are a lot of people out there who still live and preach this way, but I have issues with it. I have always had questions about this lifestyle, but after taking a few days to think about it, I thought maybe I am a little bit of a feminist than I originally thought, because I believe in equality in relationships and if you are doing something against God, whether you are a man, woman, trans, gay, disabled you should all be punished for those choices. That’s my say on it.

Overall, the book itself was so good! I wasn’t even halfway finished with it before I basically announced it to anyone within ear shot that it was my favorite book of the year and at the moment, I have read four others so this is a pretty big deal for me! If you don’t normally go for these types of books, I definitely think you should at least to try to find it at your local library or if you have Prime Reading too, you can check it out there to see if you are proven wrong like I was!

Have you read Victoria’s novel “Jane Doe” yet? If you said yes, what did you like or hate about it? Let’s chat below!

“Mini” Birthday Book Wishlist

Howdy!

I became a reader in a very different way than maybe other kids. I’ve talked in my other blog posts that in school, I basically hated reading because we were never taught to read to ourselves, we were always reading out loud. And I was one out of like six people in the class that was a slow reader and stumbled on my words. In elementary, we were taken out of class to be read with a teacher aide or my aide in general. They would either read the story or we would do it, but sometimes we wouldn’t finish it at the same time as the rest of our class would and have to continue reading it the next day. The moral of the story, reading sucked! However when we entered our freshman year of high school it was pretty hilarious for us slow readers to hear our peers mess up just as bad when our teacher brought us the Shakespeare stories! Romeo and Juliet was a blessing in disguise! It was a bitch to read for every single one of us. I was happy that I only had to read that book once.

Speaking of freshman year, ironically enough the class that we would be reading Shakespeare and other classics throughout the whole year. It was also the class that got me interested in reading for once in my life. Our teacher told us during our first day of class. On Friday it would be our reading day. We had to find a book to read for the whole period. He explained in the past some of his students have fallen asleep in his class and he’d done almost everything he could without getting himself in a lot of trouble. The one story that scared me apparently was when kids did fall asleep in his class, that he’d grab a book from another student’s desk and slap it on that student’s desk or drop it hard on the floor so the blast was loud.  At this time, I had the same teacher for two periods at the beginning of the day back-to-back. So you can imagine the horror I faced if I never brought a book to read in his classes. It took me a couple of weeks to figure what I would like, because before I only rented books that had very little paragraphs and a lot of pictures in them. I think after a month I started to read nonfiction books like it was nobody’s business!

I even took two separate reading classes as an electives later on! I loved my Novels class, it was a nice smallish class and our teacher was amazing. I actually had another English teacher than the one I always had which was weird at first, but it was cool. In this class, we read a lot of classics like Frankenstein and Silas Manor. My favorite though was Night by Elie Wiesel. My second class was called Short Stories and I was back with my favorite English teacher but we had a large class. Honestly, I liked Novels better. I read a lot in school! I even read at home whenever I had a really good book. I was a bit surprised that when I graduated from high school I actually kept up with my reading, even getting into more mature book genres like erotica, which tends to scare everybody sometimes, but it’s understandable! I’ve almost completed my first ever series and I’m starting to get like favorite authors and I honestly didn’t think I would. I don’t think anybody in my family thought that either!

Now that I’ve said this, I’m sad to say that I haven’t been in a big reading mood lately. The last time I read a book was probably in June when I finally finished The Fault In Our Stars I think I only finished it so I could watch the film. Although I haven’t been reading, it doesn’t mean I didn’t stop looking for more books. Sometimes I wish I did, it would be a lot better for me! I decided to write up a wishlist because since I can’t get like iTunes cards at the moment, I would rather be given Barnes & Noble gift cards instead for either my birthday or Christmas.

Before I get started on explaining all these books pictured above, I wanted to say that I have left out a couple of series. In the past, I’ve started the Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling, Evermore by Alyson Noel, and Vampire Academy by Richelle Mead series but I’ve never finished them but I have been wanting to get back into all three of them. I’ve even deleted the film adaptions of VA from my DVR and forcing me to stay away until I’ve actually finished the first book. I need book two for both HP and Evermore, but I’d like to reread both first books before starting on the rest of them. Something that is kind of interesting to me is that i don’t like a lot of sci-fi/fantasy novels, but I’ve found quite a few lately that I’m willing to take a chance on some like Fallen by Katie Barber, The Scarlet Deep by Elizabeth Hunter, and Throne Of Glass by Sarah A. Maas. Getting through all of these books that I’ve mentioned in this paragraph alone would be an accomplishment.

While I was forced to read in my 9th grade English courses, I found a genre in the nonfiction that seemed to work a lot better than anything else. I love books about royalty, whether it was of real people or not, the concept of the lives of royals just made the happiest person ever! I have a real weakness of The Tudors and Romanovs eras, so The Rival Queens by Nancy Goldstone and Nicholas and Alexandra by Robert K. Massie just kind of collided with me. I would like to read the Marie Antoinette series by Juliet Grey someday since I’m also a lover of that time as well! Three other books that talk about royalty even though the characters are made up, The Selection by Kiera Cass, Queen Of The Tearling by Erika Johansen and The Kiss Of Deception by Mary E. Pearson. Since we’re basically discussing about history in a way. There are a couple of books that are about historical people or things that happened in the world. Like, The Astronaut Wives Club by Libby Kebbel. I never got to see the last episode of the show based off this book. I had already planned on reading this book when I watched the first episode! The others are The Kitchen House by Kathleen Grisson, A Girl Aboard The Titanic by Eva Hart, Dear Abigail by Diane Jacobs, and Mrs. Hemingway by Naomi Wood.

The rest of these are my “electives” if you will. I have a problem with finding a book and if it’s too expensive I’ll find another book to replace it and I think that’s why I’m including this next batch of books because I figured quite a few of these it’ll take me some time and money to actually get, so with that being said they are: Before We Met by Lucie Whitehouse, Outlander by Diana Galabdon, The Rabbi’s Daughter by Reva Mann, My Soon-To-Be Sex Life by Judith Tewes, Never Have I Ever by Katie Heaney, Matched by Ally Condie, To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before by Jenny Han, Annie’s Ghosts by Steve Luxenburg, and .The Girls Who Went Away by Ann Fessler. Now onto my last bit of electives in the erotica category: Tell Me When by Kaylee Ryan, Nobody’s Hero by Kallyspo Masters, Tempted by Megan Hart, and lastly Conviction by Nicole Edwards

I think I’m finally finished listing all of the books I’d like to get some time soon… I think I’m going to trying to wish on a flying star! So much for a “mini” wishlist! My bad.