If We Were Villains: The Sensational TikTok Book Club pick: M.L. Rio

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Their friendship founded on their similar taste is put on the line when they take part in increasingly crazy and experimental research on how, under the right circumstances, a person could develop supernatural abilities. Many readers including Cynthia d'Aprix Sweeney, the writer of The Nest, compared this novel to Donna Tartt's The Secret History.

Filippa is the only one of the three girls of the group whom I actually love; she’s always seen as the extra – she is too volatile to fit into a category so that gives her the ability to play many roles, on- and offstage; Beware of the ones who seldom speak because they are the ones who held many secrets and truths;Next, in five acts that are reminiscent of Shakespeare, we learn what really happened in 1997 at the Dellecher Classical Conservatory in Broadwater, Illinois, where seven theater students known as “the players,” were studying and performing Shakespeare during their fourth and final year at the school. Alexander - The funny friend. He's gay and latinx. Known for partying/drinking/drugs. He was one of my favouries because he was so funny. Usually gets the funny side character parts. A group of boys at Welton Academy find their lives changing for the better when they get a new English professor named John Keating.

Alexander Vass, a gay former foster-care student of half-Latino descent and drug addict. Plays The Villain. But maybe every day we let grief in, we’ll also let a little bit of it out, and eventually we’ll be able to breathe again. At least that’s how Shakespeare would tell the story.” The game Aces is playing is a dangerous one and soon it becomes obvious they are planning something much larger than just high school. I’m afraid," she said, after what felt like a year , speaking very slowly, "that I’m prettier than I’m talented or intelligent, and that because of that no one will ever take me seriously. As a person or a performer." The title of M. L. Rio’s debut novel, If We Were Villains (2017), is borrowed from William Shakespeare’s King Lear, the final play the fourth-year acting students perform before Oliver Marks confesses to a crime he did not commit. In King Lear, the full line suggests that excess (“surfeits of our own behavior”) leads to disasters that people will try to blame on others. In Shakespeare, the Sun, Moon, and stars are “made guilty” as a result. The novel approaches the problem of excess and potential (‘if’) villainy differently, denying even the possibility of guilt. When the group agrees to not save their grievously injured classmate, they never ask whether this decision will make them guilty of murder, focusing instead on how it would benefit them if this abusive bully were not to be alive, and in the novel the attempt to escape responsibility wreaks havoc. Over the course of the novel’s five “acts,” the group will grapple with this conditional phrase, wondering what it means to understand themselves as villains in the drama they together enact.

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A good Shakespearian actor - a good actor of any stripe, really - doesn’t just say words, he feels them. We all felt the passions of the characters we played as if they were our own. But a character’s emotions don’t cancel out the actor’s - instead you feel both at once. Imagine having all your own thoughts and feelings tangled up with all the thoughts and feelings of a whole other person. It can be hard, sometimes, to sort out which is which.” The sky was clear and quiet, stars peering curiously down at us from a wide dome of indigo. The water, too, was still, and I thought, what liars they are, the sky and the water. Still and calm and clear, like everything was fine. It wasn’t fine, and really, it never would be again.” However, when she is invited to one of the Bunnies’ ‘Smut Salon’ something against her better judgement convinces her to go – leaving behind her only friend, Ava, at the same time.