If We Were Villains (M.L. Rio) – a review and rambles

Wipe my memory clean – I need to experience this book again.

The Happy Couple by Naoise Dolan

It is not often that I have to stop myself from finishing a book in a day, but it’s something I had to do with this one. I don’t feel like I have enough words to express what I went through when reading this book. But, for lack of a better one, perfect, comes to mind.

No amount of nicotine could age her faster than spending a while day with her family. (262)

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

This book has somewhere just over 300 pages so there is really no reason as to why it took me a near six months to read – I gotta say that … it’s a little embarrassing considering I’ve read longer books in less time.

One of the first things that I noticed about this book was the melancholy note throughout its entirety. Sure, it’s a happy story, Josie, meets Klara, the AF (Artificial Friend), the protagonist, and all of their interactions are, on the whole, happy ones. But it’s a dystopian fiction – we know going in that we can’t have it all. I’m no stranger to the genre, having been in my early teens when the mass of dystopian fiction hit the market with titles like Maze Runner, Divergent, The Hunger Games, and many more. In a way, it’s interesting going back to something that held such importance to me as well as so many other readers, and seeing it in a perhaps more personal, more real rendition.

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens

There was a lot of attention surrounding this book, I want to say somewhere around 2020 or 2021, and like many others, I bought the book and added it to my shelf. And on my shelf, it sat until February of this year when I dusted it off and threw it into my backpack ahead of my travels to the other side of the country for a Lewis Capaldi concert.

The Ink Black Heart by Robert Galbraith

Christmas holidays came and went for me and I was happy enough to be gifted this book. And so began the reading, and once I started, well, it was hard to put it down.

It’s been a while since I read a crime novel, focusing on lighter reads that I knew I wouldn’t have an issue with getting into, and I’ll admit that I was a little weary starting this book that I would not get into it. Judging that I read this in the nick of time, it was a pointless worry.