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Montverre is first seen through the eyes of a gothic character known only as The Rat: rapacious, fearful, famished, and possibly not a rat at all. “Tonight the moonlight makes the floor of the Great Hall into a game board.” The Rat observes an anomalous figure in white, the “female-male, the odd one out” wandering in the shadows. By a fluke, a brilliant woman, Claire Dryden, has been appointed Magister Ludi, Master of the Game. and looking at the four main character POVs, there was truly only one whose chapters i was actively looking forward to reading. the other three are either seemingly unnecessary or just uninteresting. And I think that’s just about everything I can say about this book without spoiling it. This is the type of story that I think it’s best to go into blind, or at least knowing as little as possible. Figuring out what is going on is part of what makes The Betrayals so addicting in the first place! There’s just nothing quite as satisfying as slowly unravelling a mystery…
And let’s not forget that this had my favorite trope of all time!! If you’ve been reading my posts for a while, you’ll know that “girl disguises herself as a boy to achieve something society has denied to her” just gets to me every single time. Okay, well, maybe not in Arabella of Mars, but it wasn’t really the trope’s fault in that one… 🙄 The Betrayals, though, had what is probably one of my favorite executions yet, apart from Tamora Pierce’s Song of the Lioness Quartet. The characters too played their part in disallowing the reader to ever feel close to an understanding of their nature or their motives. Mysteries abounded and every figure that featured here was cloaked in their own share of them. A game. Not a game. What’s next for you? Any hints you can give readers about what you’re working on now? When the pieces started to be put together, the image the reader has for a while is that Claire is the sister of Carfax, Léo's schooltime love. The ever-constant comparisons between Claire and Carfax in these scenes felt extremely uncomfortable on a first read through. It seemed very... odd, to have a bisexual protagonist fall for a female character on the basis that they heavily resemble their male sibling. I don't necessarily think that a plot with that premise is inherently an issue, but the way it was handled in this narrative left a bad taste in my mouth. It felt questionable.The Betrayals is a deeply subjective experience: to all readers of my review, it’s a personal conclusion as to whether the pay off is worth the work. For this reader, the payoff was most certainly worth the wait. The distant and slow pace is a necessary evil to appreciate this clever story that is a true masterclass of unwrapping a beguiling mystery. I never saw the twists, which was thoroughly delightful and made the book entirely worthwhile. Although, the sorrowful ending sadly took the jubilant feel from the climax, which was disappointing as I felt a more upbeat feel was needed after the leaden bleak weight throughout. So to summarize my thoughts before this review gets even more out of hand: Yes, I loved this book. I loved the characters. I loved the world. I loved how it got me thinking. So yeah – I’ll leave it at that for now! If you’ve read this book, do share your thoughts with me down in the comments! Even if you hated it, I would love to know! Where do you disagree with me? Where do you agree?
I’m not saying that Collins’ writing in The Betrayals wasn’t as spectacular as it was in The Binding… because man oh man can Collins pen a novel, but there was something just a little bit off within the story that didn’t make this as unputdownable as The Binding was for me. In The Betrayals, we are presented with a magic system called “The Grand Jeu”, which is something of an enigma wrapped in a (beautifully written) mystery. It seems to involve maths, music and philosophy and to be perfectly honest, even after finishing the novel I’m not entirely clear on the finer points – but it really doesn’t matter. Bridget Collins made me believe in the mysterious art of The Grand Jeu and the book is all the richer for it. Overall I was expecting more from this book. In terms of plot regarding the grand jeu there's not much going on since everything is abstract and we see that the characters are occupied with it, but in the end we don't really know what they are actually doing. It was a bit frustrating for me and I didn't really enjoy it. The Betrayals by Bridget Collins was my first read-a-long with Tandem Collective Global and I really enjoyed the interaction with my fellow readers. It was great to talk about what was happening and try to figure out the plot with others. We had a great group and some insightful conversations.Both Leo and Claire have built their lives on lies. And as the legendary Midsummer Game, the climax of the year, draws closer, secrets are whispering in the walls... About This Edition ISBN:
So yeah, I really liked getting to see some of the struggles Claire went through, and what a self-righteous mansplainer Léo became when he was confronted with them 😁 I really like that Bridget Collins didn’t decide to make Léo a modern-thinking ally, but showed that he, just like everyone else, was a product of the society he lived in. Although he loved Claire and did eventually come around to seeing her point of view at least a little bit, I think it was probably impossible for him to truly change how he viewed women deep down. Claire was the exception, brilliant because she was Claire, but, at least at first, still inferior because she was a woman. Why should he have questioned that she would want to kiss him? How could she truly understand Montverre, as a woman who had never been there herself? It took him to realize that she was Carfax, one of the smartest men he’d ever known, to truly see her as an equal, and to give her the option of making choices that affected both of them. And my shipper heart was just so, so satisfied 😍 It’s been a while since I shipped anyone as much as I did Léo and Carfax. I loved the way their relationship developed, how Léo went from envious hatred to defending “him” from Felix and all his other “friends”. I loved how they could talk about academics for hours and hours. How they understood one another despite their rivalry. The honest conversations they had on the astronomy tower and above the roof of the Great Hall. The underlying tension that was there the whole time. I mean, I was basically in seventh heaven when Léo walked in on Carfax playing the cello 🥰🎼 Following seven fantasy novels for young adults, Collins’s immensely successful first adult novel, 2019’s The Binding, played beguilingly with the magic of storytelling and the psychology of reading through an appealing first person narrator. Both the controlling ideas and the structure are far more ambitious in The Betrayals, which employs multiple perspectives, intricate plotting and a recondite frame of reference. It’s a jeu d’esprit, an exuberant melange of genres that includes fantasy, gothic, fable, political allegory, romance, mystery and scholastic parody. The novel is heavily indebted to Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game, in which adepts synthesise aspects of “the whole intellectual cosmos”, although Collins also critiques Hesse’s misogynist notion of high culture as the province of male sages. The first line in the description for The Betrayals inspires all sorts of intrigue so naturally, we’ve got to know… “If your life was based on a lie, would you risk it all to tell the truth?” Why or why not?She's done it again: this is another triumph from the incomparable imagination of Bridget Collins. The Betrayals sinks its teeth into you and won't let you go. It's a mesmerising, intimate and ambitious story about art, love and what it means to be human. If you loved The Binding, you'll adore The Betrayals' Erin Kelly The grand jeu is an inexplicable and indescribable game and the students of Montverre Academy are tasked with creating it. Format I Read It In: Audiobook [Which I would highly recommend! I loved the narrators! And plus, it’s freely available if you have Scribd 😉 ] And gosh, that scene in the library, after Léo had finally realized who Claire was? My heart was about to burst! No matter how flawed they are, I love the two of them so much, and it was a relief to finally have them open up to each other!
The story is narrated through four points of view and I did appreciate it, even though at times some of them were just confusing. In terms of themes, I believe this book wanted to do too many things all at once. For example I was interested in Simon's storyline and what the government was doing, but in the end it wasn't given much space.The Betrayals is an intricately composed story, that for all its brilliance, the writing was hard to read. I ended up having to resort to the audiobook to persevere, which revived my interest in the story. I absorbed and understood what was happening more than I did solely reading the kindle. The narrators did a really good job. I 100% recommend the audiobook for a better experience of the story. Montverre has changed since he studied there, even allowing a woman, Claire Dryden, to serve in the grand jeu's highest office of Magister Ludi. When Leo first sees Claire he senses an odd connection with her, though he's sure they have never met before. I'm sorry I didn't love this one, I really wanted to. There just wasn't enough substance to make this a story worth reading for me. I feel like you can have a long book OR a slow-burn book, but having both with consistently little payoff is just overwhelmingly dull and unsatisfying. I wish I could at least write more about what the book was about but honestly, I feel as though I was never told myself.
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