This has been recommended to me constantly, and been labelled as one of the best dark academia books ever written. I had such high hopes and I was so excited, but upon finishing this I’m actually confused as to how anyone rated it five stars. And I haven’t seen a single rating below five yet. To me, this book was very bland at best, unbearable at worst. It was just so mediocre and surface level, I couldn’t take anything meaningful from it. It was barely even entertaining.

I will say that I did like ML Rio’s writing for the most part, and this is definitely an author I will try again in the future. She can write, but I hated what she did with this book.

I don’t care if people can vouch for it happening in real life, people speaking to each other constantly in Shakespeare quotes is ridiculous and I hated it. It annoyed me, it barely made sense, and felt like a very cheap way of writing or almost a cop out. This book could genuinely be about 100 pages shorter if you deleted every Shakespeare quote from it, which is worrying to me. If you deleted the chapters where they’re just performing plays, it’s even shorter. What even was the plot of this book? All that happened was them acting out other people’s stories, saying other people’s words. It felt really lazy to me, and it didn’t feel like a good use of metaphor or whatever was trying to be achieved. It was irritating to read, and didn’t have any substance. Also, for whatever reading the speech flitted between two different formats with no warning or explanation. Either write the speech in a typical fashion or as you would in a play, stop flitting back and forth randomly every sentence. It was jarring.

For a character focused book, these are the most bland and two dimensional set of characters I’ve come across in a while. For a start, there’s so many of them that initially you just get confused. You never get enough ime with ay of them really to get a taste of who they are. None of them have personalities and they read like poor caricatures. Their descriptions alone are so stereotypical and very bland. Oliver is supposedly the protagonist, but he’s so boring he becomes a background character in his own narrative. They were so flat they could have all been the same person and I wouldn’t have noticed. They weren’t likeable, which I don’t care about really, but they weren’t even horrible in an interesting way. Give me actually morally grey, malicious people in full or don’t. We have an awkward inbetween here.

Their relationships are weird which I can put up with, but their relationships making no sense and being absolutely baseless I can’t forgive. None of them had any platonic chemistry let alone lust or even romance, so how anyone is getting their heart destroyed or even crying at this book is so perplexing to me. It was so shallow, and coupled with a boring plot this book just ended up being an underwhelmingly average reading experience. Most of the development was done through telling the reader rather than showing, which was also disappointing.

I usually love pretentious rich people descending into madness novels, but this wasn’t the thrill I was expecting. Also nothing about this really screamed dark academia other than them performing plays? It was just all over the place to me. Massive disappointment.