A few years ago, TikTok went absolutely wild for Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. It became the dark academia book—you know, the book with the turtlenecks and the trench coats and the fall leaves and the tattered books and the mugs of coffee, and hopefully you’re getting the vision. At the same time a few years ago, I went absolutely crazy for M.L. Rio’s If We Were Villains. 

If We Were Villains follows a group of seven bright young Shakespearean theater students at the fictional Dellecher Classical Conservatory amidst the murder of one of their peers. Flash forward 10 years and Oliver Marks (one of the students) is being released from prison for that very crime. The catch? He didn’t do it. Who did? One of the other students, of course. 

Each of the characters fits their own archetype. Oliver plays the sidekick, his best friend (and something more) James Farrow is the hero, cousins Richard and Wren Stirling fill the roles of the tyrant and the ingénue respectively, Richard’s girlfriend Meredith Dardenne gives us the femme fatale, Alexander Vass is the villain, and Filippa Kosta is the chameleon. But as the story unravels, so do the archetypes. Soon enough, each character is playing a new role and is completely unsure of who they’re meant to be without their assigned place. 

Rio is brilliant in every facet of this book. Unreliable narrators are hard to do well, but as Oliver tells his story, you feel everything you’re supposed to when your narrator isn’t completely trustworthy. Sometimes you’re skeptical, other times your heart breaks for him. And yes, you want to know who committed the crime, but it doesn’t really matter. Rio uses the murder to drive the plot, but that’s it. The real plot is much more complicated and takes you into the world of the characters—their minds, their lives. 

Of course, the plot is only as good as the characters are. Rio’s characters alone hold so much complexity individually, making each relationship between them a masterclass in blurred lines and hidden layers. Each character is flawed. Completely and utterly imperfect. And yet? They are all hauntingly indelible and refuse to leave you alone even after you’ve finished the book. Three reads later and I still lie awake at night sometimes thinking about James and Oliver, or who Filippa really is, or what happened to Wren at the end.

The entire vibe of the book is perfectly crafted. The dark academia feel is there with every turn of the page. You can smell the burning candles, feel the heat of the stage lights, see the overgrown ivy and dark stone walls. At the heart of the book is Shakespeare and even without reading any of his work, you can feel him. He’s in the characters and their tendency to start reciting verses out of nowhere; he’s in the tragic ebb and flow of the plot; he’s even in the name of the book. Shakespeare is certainly a daunting person to try and emulate in a book, but Rio herself was a Shakespearean actress, and each reference is crafted with plenty of expert background knowledge. 

I’m sure The Secret History is brilliant—at the very least, Donna Tartt is. But If We Were Villains is just, if I can be crass, that girl. Yes, it’s pretentious, but it doesn’t suffocate you. Yes, it’s confusing, but that’s the entire point. And yes, this is a book about theater kids, but no, they are not the same kind of theater kids you know. Every day I mourn the fact that this book is only 354 pages long and M.L. Rio has yet to release another book since. Her new novella, Graveyard Shift, will be out this September, so until then, I’ll be reading If We Were Villains for the fourth time and imagining a thousand different epilogue scenarios. 

On this blog, members of the Carmel High School chapter of the Quill and Scroll International Honorary Society for High School Journalists (and the occasional guest writer) produce curations of all facets of popular culture, from TV shows to music to novels to technology. We hope our readers always leave with something new to muse over. Click here to read more from MUSE.