If We Were Villains

After the first few chapters I nearly dropped the book because it seemed to be a cheap copy of ???Secret History???, but somehow I was also curious and I am - at least a little - positively surprised.

Personally (as someone who studied literature) I find it a little obnoxious and elitist that the author relies so much on Shakespeare as code: either you know the references or you are deemed less worthy. Literary references can be very helpful and give a lot more depth to a text. On the other hand you can retell/reinterpret another author???s work - as has been done a lot with Shakespeare in varying degrees of success.

But to expect your reader to actually comb through all the references that are not even culturally relevant today (because we don???t use English in the same way as 17th century theatre goers) and refer to different plays with different backgrounds and character sets seems just lazy - it shows to me that you cannot successfully find your own words to weave a story and thus rely on someone else. Or you expect people to just skim over the passages and give you the benefit of the doubt that they were important.

That being said, I would still recommend this book to people who are interested in Dark Academia & Shakespeare but have not read ???Secret History??? yet