If you like dark academia, rivals to lovers and low fantasy, look no further than here! 

The Betrayals’ merits begin and end with a gorgeous cover. There is somehow both a lot and nothing going on here. Crucial elements are vague for the sake of vagueness, so much of the book both in major and minor elements is offensive, and the craft itself isn’t even particularly well done. 

According to the blurb, The Betrayals centres around the grand jeu. The national game (or not a game, or a performance, or a religion, take your pick honestly) of some European nation (that is not France or Britain or Switzerland but deliberately not disclosed for some reason). The grand jeu is clearly made intentionally vague so the reader can never actually get a handle on what it is, how it is played, or what elements really make it up. This vagueness truly serves no purpose in the story or for the themes of the book. The author is also intentionally vague about what country this is taking place in, what time period it takes place in, and the details of the ruling political party. I believe this was an attempt to demonstrate that fascism can happen anywhere at anytime, but ultimately it is not effective and just leaves things feeling confused and hollow.

This book is also wildly offensive with absolutely no hint to what the reader is in for in the back cover description. This book is actually less about the grand jeu and more about the ruling political party’s oppression of Christians. The Christian oppression complex is weird and disgusting in and of itself, but Bridget Collins succeeds in making it worse. Collins has essentially recreated pre-Holocaust/World War II Nazi Germany and substituted Christians for Jewish people in her ahistorical fantasy world. Collins goes out of her way to inform us that the ruling party in the book came to power by gaining the support of the working class through blaming the country’s struggles on communists and Christians. In this reimagining of history Christians are marked with a cross on their clothing, put on a registry which requires special papers, and secretly rounded up by police then left in a hostile area. There was no creativity here, just a disgustingly antisemitic warping of history to satisfy the bizarre Christian desire to be oppressed. As if this wasn’t enough, Christians are lumped in with Muslims and Jewish people, who are actually oppressed (pages 51 and 78). The author also uses the slur g*psy (derogatory term for Romani people) and maligns their beliefs (page 183) for no real reason with nothing else done to combat that behaviour in the text. 

The misogyny in this book both of the time period (which isn’t even specified but implied to be historical) and the characters goes completely unchallenged. Women are repeatedly maligned as less than the men, stupider, more frivolous, overly sensitive, petty. The two main female characters (Magister Ludi Claire Dryden, and The Rat) are almost never referred to by their names but rather their titles. Their supposed differences from other women are also repeatedly pointed out. The result is two dehumanized “not like other girls” caricatures who exist solely to further the development of male characters’ stories (Léo and Claire, Simon and The Rat). 

The twist of Claire being the Carfax that Léo knew was predictable and boring. It diminished Léo’s previous relationship with Carfax, his current relationship with Claire, and the significance of Carfax’s death. In conjunction with the rest of the book it also came off as both transphobic and homophobic, whether that was the intention or not. Earlier in the book there is a seemingly throwaway line about an irrelevant side character who dresses in typically male clothing. It is said that, “she’d rather be an honorary man than speak up for women” (page 203). This is the exact attitude that TERFs hold towards trans men and trans masculine people. TERFs believe, that just as is portrayed in this book through Claire/Carfax, that trans men are really women pretending to be men due to not wanting to be disadvantaged under patriarchy. This story seems to play into that belief, and taken in conjunction with the Christian persecution fantasy it entertains, I’m not inclined to give the author the benefit of the doubt. In addition, the story gains little to nothing by retconning the queer relationship between Carfax and Léo other than getting to bury its gays. While there is less explicitly homophobic in this story, eliminating the only queer relationship retroactively once again does not look good in combination with everything else going on in this book. 

The least of Bridget Collins’ sins in The Betrayals is the craft, however it also does not hold up under scrutiny. Bridget Collins clearly intended to write a Very Serious Literary Work with Something To Say. Ultimately what she created is something that can’t be taken seriously and has nothing to say. She is vague just for the sake of vagueness, it doesn’t accomplish anything. The character of The Rat seems to serve little purpose to the story. The character’s main function seems to be an attempt to shock readers through grossness and light body horror to enhance the impression of this as a serious literary work. The Rat’s secondary function is to further the Christian persecution narrative through her interactions with Simon, but that is irrelevant to the main plot of Claire/Léo/Carfax. We are also repeatedly told things instead of shown them. Collins just can’t seem to deal in subtleties that would be so much more compelling in this book. She can’t just show us that Léo is is romantically interested in Carfax (although it is obvious), she has to spend two pages telling us that Léo has a crush on Carfax. We are told, seemingly out of nowhere, that Léo loves Claire separately from his memory of Carfax. What led to that? Why are we suddenly being told this when up to that point Claire has been a sort of stand in or surrogate for Carfax in Léo’s mind? It might be shocking for Bridget Collins to find out that readers can, in fact, figure things out on their own and through subtext, and don’t need to be bashed over the head with them. Perhaps, instead of explicitly stating the obvious, she could spend those pages criticizing the disgusting attitudes displayed in this book. 

What I liked about the book: the richness of the language and the complicated system of roles and reversals that kept me reading. What I disliked: literally everything else. The attempt at Holocaust imagery is absurd, the love story completely overshadows the setting and the threats, and the characters are completely forgettable and ordinary. The author is also a TERF and you can see it in the way that the final reveal is played out. Honestly want my money back.

Good idea with potential. Lits of words and description but not much explaining. I felt it fell flat and the ending was underwhelming.

Perhaps not helped as I had high hopes given how much I loved the binding!

The premise of this sounded like I book I would find ideal, but while I was intrigued, I was constantly frustrated, sometimes to the point of anger, at this book. The big plot reveal at the 80% mark made me literally get up from my chair and yell, it was so oddly placed and confusing. This book goes between a “present time” 1930s in an unnamed European country (meant to be France? Somewhere French-speaking? Somewhere where French culture was just copied and borrowed from?) and flashbacks to when the main character was attending the school, told with diary entries. I most looked forward to the diary entries, but I had to keep reminding myself that the narrator was 19-20 at the time of writing and not somewhere between 14 and 17, which is how I personally think the students seemed to act. The side plot with the Rat seemed like such a random addition that it almost felt out of place for most of the story. Also, maybe it’s because I hadn’t read the book this one is based on, but it was so frustrating to me how the Grand Jeu is never properly explained. I didn’t know it had something to do with music until like 20% in, but there’s also some kind of dance involved? Also math?? They say it’s meant to be worship, but they’re never clear on WHAT they are worshipping with the game. I’m good with a sense of mystery, but the whole time I had no grasp on this main piece of the plot.

My main issue, though, is the allusion to Holocaust-style religious prejudice, complete with having to have a symbol on your clothes to indicate you belong to a certain “other” religion — for the most part, this was Christianity. That subplot and its necessity makes NO sense to me and was uncomfortable, especially with it being set just a decade before WWII began (even though there is no confirmation that this story takes place in a universe where that war happens). I was here for the slow burn enemies-to-lovers romance, and the rest of the time I was left reeling about the plot points and character decisions.

I love The Binding and I had such high hopes for this, but found it very disappointing. The world-building feels half-done - I don't insist on everything being tied up in a neat little bow for me but there was too much left completely unexplained in this one, and dead-end storylines that could just have been cut. The first and second halves feel like they're from totally different books, and the ending is rushed and unsatisfying.

I'm giving it 2 stars because the prose is lovely in places.

This also features genuinely breathtaking levels of queerbaiting, very poor depictions of mental illness and suicide, and an uncomfortably TERFy view of What It Means To Be A Woman.

 This book was not what I was expecting when I picked this up. Forgive me but I compare everything to YA books I've read even when the subject in question is not a YA book so the book I'm gonna pull out to compare this to is The Dark Unwinding. They are very different books, don't get me wrong, but the vibes are more over there than the The Queen's Rising I was expecting. I don't know, relatively few people would find these comparisons actually useful but oh well I have a limited vocabulary. Should I also mention that I read the description back in May or whatever when I first came across the book in my library and thought it looked promising, but I didn't read it now before starting the book and didn't remember what it said from before so I basically went in blind.

The book follows an unlikeable man Leo who is expelled from his minister position in his Nazi-esque government (yes, Leo is a Nazi I guess) and sent to stay for the year at Montverre, the school he used to go to where they study "the grand jeu", which is like a game involving music, math, poetry, art, etc. all put together to commune with the divine (sounds weird but it totally works in text), and back when he was there he had won the gold medal and had had ambitions to become Magister Ludi (the master of the grands jeux). Meanwhile we also have the perspective of Magister Dryden, the current Magister Ludi and the first female one who is really put off by the presence of Leo in particular and we don't know why right away, and she has lingering trauma from someone's death long ago (tw: (this may or may not be a spoiler I don't actually remember) (view spoiler)). And we also get chapters in the perspective of journal entries of the younger Leo when he was attending the school and his rivalrous relationship with a fellow student, Carfax de Courcy. The perspective we actually start off in is that of the Rat, a girl who lives in the school who lives and thinks of herself as a rat, whom nobody knows about except to think that the school is haunted. I will say that starting off in her chapter may have been a bad choice because immediately I was like what am I getting into and this might be boring and what will the plot be/what is going on? Luckily I was reading this as an ebook on libby so I could check and see that there aren't that many rat chapters but it still put me off a bit. That also put me on edge going into the rest of the upcoming chapters because I was now under the impression that this book was going to be a slog. I also didn't like feeling so in the dark at the beginning of this book, where every single character knew more than I did and I had to figure out even simple things like oh this is actually a girl and not a rat, isn't it? But I can't truly say that any perspective or even chapter ended up being truly boring because I may have been disappointed to leave certain chapters (namely the journal entries from the past, those never had even a hint of boringness anywhere near them and I didn't want them to stop) but a page or so into any chapter (including the rat's) and I was hooked because they all had something going on or really intense feelings and I can't look away from that. The biggest theme of this book was each of their struggles with mental health and I think it was handled mostly compellingly (maybe we could've done a bit more?).

My biggest possible endorsement for this book is that I have never highlighted as many lines/paragraphs in a book that wasn't a book I was studying in English class or something. I have 55 highlights and not one was to save a word I didn't know or a part I didn't like, and I only started highlighting at chapter 10. These were all just lines and interactions I genuinely wanted to go back to and remember or things that helped me understand the characters better. I don't usually highlight at all but this time I was overcome and I have not felt this urge to go back and endlessly revisit parts in years. Also, there was a twist and it fucking shook me and also made so many little things make more sense/ be put in new context at the same time (originally before this their specific desires in the present were looking kind of uncomfortable tbh). The actual atmosphere of Montverre is wonderful (my favourite is the space above the ceiling of the great hall), the tension never leaves even though we do experience a range of emotions (though always regret), and all the potentially disjointed parts come together at the end (though I did kind of want the library to burn down to acknowledge all the times that was thought of) (but then the book acknowledged that desire (view spoiler) I could live in this book for days. I don't know that it tells me things about the world or anything deep like that but it is a meal of emotions.

A thing I'm not sure about:
- Christians are persecuted in this fictional regime, and we know that other religions exist too because they are mentioned by name but it is unclear whether they are also persecuted. Christians are the ones that are focused on, apparently because "The Old Man went to a Catholic School". Christians are not in a 1:1 comparison with Jews either because a) Jews exist and b) everyone is constantly making Christian references and saying pardon the Christian reference. I'm doubtful that Nazis and the non-Jewish German public in the time of the Nazis were constantly making references to Jewish things even if it was in a pardon me kind of way. I haven't really formed any thoughts about that yet though