The Better World with Design Book Review: If We Were Villains

Welcome to The Better World with Design Book Club Field Report — where I don’t just review books — I break them open: craft, theme, and the arguments readers have when the last page is still hot. I’m your host, and I’m here for the stuff under the story: why a book feels intoxicating, why a character divide turns into a moral debate, and why some novels stick like a bruise. If you like spoiler-smart conversation, clean structure, and a point you can argue with your friends, you’re in the right place. Today I’m starting at the beginning: Act I — the setup. Act I is the seduction: Dellecher, the seven students, and the core idea that performance doesn’t stay onstage — it becomes identity. Here’s what you’ll get from this episode: I’ll map the atmosphere (how Rio builds the dark-academia spell), map the constellation (how the group functions as a system), and name what Act I is quietly setting in motion. Quick spoiler note before I go any further: Acts I and II are spoiler-light — premise, craft, and dynamics, but no hinge reveals. Act III is the spoiler gate, and Acts III–V are full-spoiler analysis. I’ll clearly warn you at the start of Act III so you can tap out if you’re not ready. Zooming out for ten seconds, here’s the five-act map: Act II: pressure builds and the group’s hierarchy shows its teeth. Act III: point of no return — full spoilers. Act IV: fallout and fracture. Act V: verdict, meaning, and the cost of the ending. Depending on where you are with the book: if you haven’t read it, stop after Act II, read the book, then come back for the spoiler-heavy back half. If you have read it, stay with me — I’m going to help you catch what Act I hides in plain sight. Last thing before I start: subscribe so you don’t miss the next Acts, and send me your take — did the Shakespeare feel hypnotic or insufferable, and who did you sympathize with, and why? I’ll pull the best disagreements into the later episodes. Act I — the setup. Cold open. Here’s what I mean by “the seduction.” Before anything big happens, the book makes you feel the quiet of Dellecher—the kind that isn’t calm, it’s sealed-off. So instead of running through plot, I’m going to start with the vibe: what it’s like to step into this world, and why it’s so easy to get pulled in. I want you to feel what Oliver feels in those first pages—the intoxicating, slightly unnerving sense that the stage is always on, even when the curtain’s down. And Rio pulls that off immediately, because she doesn’t open with action. She opens with language. The very first line Oliver speaks is a Shakespeare quote, and that's not an accident. From page one, Rio is telling you: these students don't just study the Bard—they breathe his words. Their conversations are laced with iambic pentameter. Their insults come from King Lear. Their flirtations echo Romeo and Juliet. It's seductive, this constant elevation of speech, this sense that every mundane interaction has been transformed into art. But it's also a trap. Because when you live entirely in someone else's words, when does your own voice get to speak? Rio builds Dellecher as a place of extreme insularity—these seven students live together, train together, perform together, and rarely interact with anyone outside their circle. It's a hothouse environment, and the temperature keeps rising. The school itself is described in gothic, almost haunted terms: the Castle library with its fireplace and leather chairs, the frozen lake that reflects the night sky like a portal, the tower rooms where the students sleep in close quarters. Everything about the physical space reinforces the feeling of being cut off from the outside world. Their insults come from King Lear. Their flirtations echo Romeo and Juliet. It's seductive, this constant elevation of speech, this sense that every mundane interaction has been transformed into art. But it's also a trap. Because when you live entirely in someone else's words, when does your own voice get to speak? Rio builds Dellecher as a place of extreme insularity—these seven students live together, train together, perform together, and rarely interact with anyone outside their circle. It's a hothouse environment, and the temperature keeps rising. The school itself is described in gothic, almost haunted terms: the Castle library with its fireplace and leather chairs, the frozen lake that reflects the night sky like a portal, the tower rooms where the students sleep in close quarters. Everything about the physical space reinforces the feeling of being cut off from the outside world. And here's where the groupthink lens starts to do its work, even this early. Because Dellecher doesn't just teach Shakespeare—it teaches a very specific hierarchy. There are leads and understudies. There are those who get cast as heroes and those who play the fool. And that hierarchy, once established through casting, bleeds into every other aspect of their lives. Richard is Caesar because he plays Caesar. James is the romantic lead because he's beautiful and tragic. Oliver is the observer because he's always been the understudy. Rio lets you feel the seduction of this system before she shows you its violence. In Act I, the performances are still thrilling. The post-show rituals—brandy, cigarettes, late-night dissections of each other's work—still feel like belonging rather than surveillance. But even here, there are hints. Richard's charisma has an edge. The way the group defers to him isn't just respect—it's fear dressed up as admiration. Oliver describes moments where Richard's eyes go cold, where his praise feels like a test rather than a gift. The book club reaction to Act I is fascinating, because this is where readers either buy in or check out. Some people find the Shakespeare-soaked dialogue pretentious. Others find it hypnotic. But here's what everyone agrees on: Rio makes you work for it. She doesn't explain every reference. She doesn't hold your hand through the allusions. She assumes you'll either keep up or get swept along by the rhythm of it, and that choice—to trust the reader, to demand their full attention—is part of what makes the novel feel so immersive. One more thing before I move on. This section is where Rio establishes her central metaphor: the mirror. Dellecher is a place of constant reflection—literal mirrors in the rehearsal studios, the mirrored surface of the lake, the way the students see themselves only through their roles. Oliver describes watching his friends and seeing both the people they are and the characters they're becoming, and he can't always tell where one ends and the other begins. That blurring, that dangerous fluidity, is the engine of everything that follows. So when you close Act I, you should feel like you've been invited into a beautiful, exclusive world—and you should also feel the first whisper of unease. Because beauty this intense, this controlled, always comes at a price. Now let's talk about what happens when that price comes due, and the vibe shifts from seduction to suspicion. Alright—here’s what I’m doing with this series, and how I’m structuring it. Alright, let’s get our bearings. You've just finished a deep immersion into Dellecher's seductive, gothic atmosphere—you know what the place feels like, you understand why these students are so intoxicating to watch. Now I need to talk about what you're actually signing up for with this series, and why I'm structuring it the way I am. This is a five-act review series, which means I’m going to follow the same dramatic structure M.L. Rio uses in the novel itself. Each episode corresponds to one Act of the book. That's not just a gimmick—it's the most honest way to engage with a novel that's this obsessed with theatrical form. Rio didn't divide her story into five acts because she ran out of chapter titles. She did it because the entire book is a performance, and I’m going to treat it that way. Here's what that means for you as a listener. Act I—this episode—is spoiler-light. I’m staying in the realm of premise, tone, character setup, and craft. I'll talk about themes, but I won't spoil the hinge moments or the ending. You can listen to this episode even if you haven't read the book yet, and it'll give you everything you need to decide whether you want to pick it up. But starting in Act III, I’m going full spoilers. I'll give you a clear gate—a moment where I pause and say, "Alright, spoiler warning, from here on I’m talking Act III and beyond"—so you can bail if you need to. Acts IV and V are completely spoiler-forward, because that's where the meaning lives, and I'm not going to dance around it. Here's the thing: this isn't just a book review. It's also a deep dive into two specific lenses that I think unlock what makes this novel so powerful—and so dangerous to read uncritically. The first lens is groupthink. I'm going to show you how Rio maps the psychology of groups under pressure—how insular communities create their own moral logic, how hierarchy gets naturalized, how language becomes a tool of control. This isn't me importing some outside framework onto the text. Rio is writing about groupthink deliberately. The novel is a case study in what happens when a small, elite group starts to believe its own mythology. The second lens is the book club field report. I'm going to pull in real reactions from readers—the debates, the splits, the moments where people's interpretations diverged wildly. Because here's what's fascinating about If We Were Villains: it's a book that people read completely differently depending on who they identify with and what they think performance is for. Some readers see tragedy. Others see manipulation. Some see a love story. Others see a cautionary tale about the cost of aestheticizing your life. Those splits are meaningful, and I want to honor them. The third thread—woven throughout—is the review resource layer. I'm going to talk about craft: how Rio builds tension, how she uses motifs, why her pacing works, what makes her prose so hypnotic even when it's dense. If you're a writer, or if you just love talking about how books are made, this is for you. So, three lenses: groupthink, book club reaction, and craft. They're not going to be evenly distributed across every episode. Some Acts will lean harder into one lens than another, because that's where the material lives. But by the end of Act V, you’ll have the full picture. One more promise: I'm not going to waste your time with recap. If you've read the book, you don't need me to summarize the plot. If you haven't, a plot summary won't help you—you need context, interpretation, and argument. That's what I'm here to give you. Every section of every episode is designed to add something new to the conversation, not just restate what Rio already wrote. Okay. Expectations set. Spoiler policy locked in. Now let's talk about why Dellecher matters—not just as a setting, but as the engine that makes every single thing in this novel possible. Next, I want to talk about the stage itself: Dellecher—and why theatre is the engine of everything in this novel. Alright, you've felt the atmosphere. You know what Dellecher looks like, sounds like, feels like. Now let's talk about why it works—not just as a backdrop, but as the structural force that makes every single thing in this novel possible. Because here's the thing: Dellecher isn't just a setting. It's a pressure chamber. And the theatre program isn't just what these students study—it's the operating system that runs their entire social world. Rio doesn't waste a single page on exposition that doesn't serve this central truth: when you live inside a performance, the performance starts living inside you. I’ll start with the physical space, because Rio is meticulous about this. Dellecher is isolated. It's a small liberal arts college somewhere vaguely New England, vaguely East Coast, but the geography doesn't matter because the students rarely leave campus. The theatre students especially—they live in the same building, rehearse in the same studios, drink at the same pub, take their cigarette breaks on the same stone steps. The entire world shrinks to about four locations: the Castle (the academic building with its gothic library and rehearsal halls), the dormitory tower where they sleep in close quarters, the dining hall, and the lakefront. That last one—the lake—is where Rio does some of her most elegant symbolic work. It's beautiful, it's reflective, it's constantly described in near-magical terms. But it's also cold, dark, and deep. The students go there to think, to fight, to kiss, to hide. It becomes a mirror in every sense: literal (the glassy surface reflects the sky and the stars) and metaphorical (it shows you what you want to see, until it doesn't). Rio uses the lake as a recurring image of both intimacy and danger, and by the time you reach Act III, you understand why. But the isolation isn't just physical. It's social. These seven students—Oliver, James, Richard, Alexander, Wren, Filippa, and Meredith—are the only fourth-years in the conservatory-style theatre program. Everyone else dropped out or transferred. So they're not just a friend group; they're the entire cohort. There's no one else to turn to, no outside perspective, no relief valve. Every conflict, every attraction, every rivalry has to be resolved within the circle, because there is no outside the circle. And here's where the theatre-as-engine piece starts doing its heaviest lifting. Because Dellecher's program isn't just intense—it's hierarchical by design. Every semester, the students are cast in a major production, and those casting decisions determine their social standing. If you're cast as the lead, you're the lead—not just onstage, but in every rehearsal, every post-show debrief, every late-night conversation. If you're the understudy, you're the understudy everywhere. The roles bleed. Richard plays Caesar, Macbeth, the king. So Richard becomes the king. He's the one who holds court at the pub, the one whose approval everyone seeks, the one whose moods set the temperature of the room. James plays the romantic leads—Romeo, Benedick—so James becomes the romantic center of the group, the one everyone is a little bit in love with, the one whose sadness feels like poetry. Oliver plays the sidekicks, the messengers, the comic relief. So Oliver becomes the observer, the one who watches and narrates but is never quite the protagonist of his own life. Rio makes this explicit in Oliver's narration. He describes himself as "a secondary character in someone else's story," and he's not being self-deprecating—he's being accurate. The casting has told him who he is, and he's internalized it so completely that he can't imagine a version of himself that exists outside that role. This is where the groupthink lens starts to shimmer even in Act I, before anything has gone wrong. Because what Rio is showing you is a system where identity is assigned, not chosen. And once it's assigned, it's reinforced every single day through performance, through language, through the group's collective belief. Richard is charismatic because everyone agrees he's charismatic. James is beautiful because everyone agrees he's beautiful. Oliver is marginal because everyone agrees he's marginal. It's a closed loop. And the Shakespeare makes it worse—or rather, makes it perfect, if you're trying to build a hothouse environment where people lose track of their own voices. Because these students don't just quote Shakespeare casually. They speak almost entirely in his cadences. Their arguments are Shakespearean arguments. Their compliments are Shakespearean compliments. Their insults, their flirtations, their existential crises—all of it filtered through the Bard. On one level, this is intoxicating. It makes every conversation feel elevated, witty, significant. But on another level, it's erasure. Because if you never speak in your own words, if every emotion you express has already been written by someone else, then who are you? Rio doesn't answer that question directly, but she plants it early and lets it grow. Here's the key thing: Dellecher works because it's a world where performance is the highest value. Not honesty, not vulnerability, not even talent in the raw sense—performance. The ability to inhabit a role so completely that the audience (and your peers) forget you're acting. And the students are graded on this. Their futures depend on it. So they get very, very good at performing, even when they're offstage. Especially when they're offstage. Rio structures the novel so that you experience this the way Oliver does: gradually, seductively, and then all at once with a kind of sick recognition. In the early pages, the performances feel thrilling. The way the group dissects a scene over brandy and cigarettes feels like intellectual rigor. The way they dress in vintage coats and boots and scarves feels like aesthetics, like intentionality. But slowly, you start to notice the edges. The way Richard's compliments have barbs. The way dissent is met with silence, or worse, with pity. The way "we" is used more often than "I." And the theatre itself—the actual productions they perform—becomes a rehearsal for the real drama. The violence in the plays starts to feel like foreshadowing. The betrayals, the poisonings, the murders—they're all there onstage, night after night, and the students perform them with total commitment. Rio is very deliberate about which plays she chooses: Julius Caesar, Macbeth, King Lear. These aren't comedies. These are tragedies about power, ambition, and the cost of loyalty. And the students are so deep inside these stories that they stop being able to see them as cautionary tales. Instead, they become scripts. One craft note before I move on: Rio's descriptions of the actual performances are some of the best writing in the book. She doesn't just tell you the students are good—she shows you the sweat, the adrenaline, the way the lights feel, the way the audience's silence shifts when you've got them. If you've ever done theatre, these passages will wreck you. And if you haven't, they'll make you understand why people get addicted to it. Because theatre, done well, is the most intense kind of presence you can experience. You are entirely, completely alive in the moment. And that high is what keeps these students coming back, even when the cost gets steep. So when I say Dellecher is the engine, here's what I mean: it's the place where performance becomes identity, where hierarchy becomes natural, where language becomes borrowed, and where the group's reality is the only reality that matters. That's not an accident. That's the entire thesis of the novel, and Rio builds it into every single scene. Now, with that foundation locked in, I need to talk about the argument I’m making across this entire series—the lens that helps explain what Rio is really doing, and why this book is more than just a dark academia thriller. Now here’s the big thesis I’m building across the whole series—and the questions I’m using to track it. Alright. You've seen the world. You know the pressure chamber exists, you know how performance rewires identity, you know the stakes are life-or-death even when they're just grades and casting calls. Now I need to tell you what this entire series is actually about—what lens I'm using, what question I'm chasing, and why I think If We Were Villains deserves more than just "dark academia with Shakespeare and murder." Because here's the thing: this book gets talked about a lot, and most of that talk centers on the mystery (who did it, why, was it justified) or the aesthetic (the romanticization of cold libraries and vintage coats and cigarettes in the rain). And those conversations are fine—they're part of the book's appeal. But they're not what makes the book dangerous. They're not what makes it stick in your head months later, making you second-guess your own friend groups, your own in-jokes, your own moments of going along to get along. What makes this book dangerous is that it's a perfect, methodical case study in groupthink—and Rio wrote it that way on purpose. So here's my thesis, the argument I'm building across all five Acts: If We Were Villains is not a whodunit. It's a study of how a small, elite, isolated group creates its own reality, polices that reality, and then sacrifices one of its own to preserve it. It's about what happens when performance becomes identity, when language becomes a shared code that excludes outsiders, and when loyalty to the group supersedes loyalty to the truth—or to yourself. Groupthink isn't just a backdrop here. It's the mechanism. It's the reason the plot happens the way it does, the reason certain characters make the choices they make, and the reason the ending lands the way it does. If you don't see the groupthink, you're just watching a tragedy. If you do see it, you're watching a horror story about how easy it is to lose yourself inside a collective. And the brilliant, brutal thing Rio does is she makes you complicit. Because for the first half of the book, you want to be part of this group. You want to speak in Shakespeare quotes and drink brandy in the library and feel like you're part of something elevated, something that matters. The groupthink is seductive. It feels like intimacy. It feels like belonging. And by the time you realize what it costs, you're already in too deep. That's the lens I'm using across all five episodes. Every Act, I'm going to show you how the groupthink operates—how it's built in Act I, how it shows its teeth in Act II, how it becomes deadly in Act III, how it fractures in Act IV, and how it either breaks or calcifies in Act V. Some Acts will go harder on this than others, because that's where the material lives. Act III, for example, is going to be the deepest dive, because that's the point of no return—the moment when "letting something happen" becomes "doing it." But the thread runs through the whole series. Now, I'm not just here to lecture you about group psychology. This is also a review resource, which means I'm going to talk about craft—how Rio builds this world on the page, how she uses motifs and pacing and voice to make you feel the pressure even when nothing overtly violent is happening. And it's also a book club field report, which means I'm going to bring in real reader reactions, the debates, the splits, the moments where people's interpretations diverged completely. Because this book is fascinating in how differently people read it depending on who they identify with and what they think the "point" is. So, three lenses woven together: groupthink (the argument), craft (the review resource), and book club reaction (the field report). They're not going to be evenly distributed in every section—some parts lean harder into one than another—but by the end of Act V, you'll have the full picture. Here are the guiding questions I’m chasing across the series: 1. At what point does loyalty to the group become complicity? This is the central moral question of the novel, and it's also the question that splits readers most sharply. Some people think the group is protecting each other out of love. Others think they're protecting the group's mythology at the expense of individual conscience. Rio doesn't give you an easy answer, but she gives you all the evidence you need to argue either side. I’m going to track that line—the moment when “we’re in this together” becomes “we can’t let anyone break ranks.” 2. How does shared language create—and enforce—a shared reality? The Shakespeare thing isn't just flavor. It's structural. When you speak entirely in someone else's words, you stop being able to articulate your own thoughts. You stop being able to dissent, because dissent requires a vocabulary the group hasn't pre-approved. I’m going to look at how Rio uses dialogue and narration to show you a group that has linguistically locked itself into a single interpretation of events. 3. What happens when performance becomes so total that you lose access to your own interiority? This is the existential horror at the heart of the book. Oliver is the narrator, but he's also the least self-aware character in some ways, because he's spent so long performing the role of observer that he doesn't know how to stop. I’m going to talk about what it means to live inside a role so completely that you can't remember what you were like before you put it on. Those three questions are going to guide every deep dive, every craft analysis, every book club debate. And by the time I get to Act V, I'll have answered them—or at least, I'll understand why Rio chose not to answer them cleanly. One last thing before I move into the character work: I want to name what this series is not doing. I'm not here to tell you whether the book is "good" or "bad" in some universal sense. I'm not here to rank it against other dark academia novels or argue about whether it's better than The Secret History. Those conversations are fine, but they're not interesting to me. What's interesting to me is what the book is trying to do, how it's trying to do it, and whether it succeeds on its own terms. My job is to show you the machine, name the parts, explain how they work together, and then let you decide what you think of the thing it builds. So that's the thesis. That's the argument. That's what I’m doing here. Now, with that locked in, let's talk about the people—because groupthink doesn't happen in a vacuum. It happens when you put specific personalities in a specific structure and apply specific pressure. So let's meet the seven students who are about to spend four years performing their way into a tragedy, and let's figure out what roles they're playing—both onstage and off. Alright—let’s meet the cast, but as a system: who each person is in the group, and what function they serve. Alright. You know the world. You know the thesis. Now let's talk about the people—because groupthink doesn't happen in a vacuum. It happens when you put specific personalities in a specific structure and apply specific pressure. And what Rio does brilliantly is she doesn't give you seven individuals who happen to be in the same program. She gives you a system. A constellation. Seven people who only make sense in relation to each other, who have been cast into roles long before the novel even starts, and who will perform those roles until the structure collapses. Here's the key thing: these aren't just characters. They're functions. And if you don't see what role each person is playing in the group's ecosystem, you'll miss why certain people get scapegoated, why certain people get protected, and why the group makes the choices it makes when everything starts to fracture. So let's meet the seven, not as a roster, but as a system. I'm going to tell you what role they occupy, what they provide to the group, and what happens when that role gets destabilized. And I'm going to do it in the order that makes the power structure visible, not the order they're introduced in the book. Richard Stirling — The Apex. Richard is the sun the others orbit. He's older, taller, richer, more classically handsome, more naturally commanding. He gets cast as the kings, the generals, the men who lead. And offstage, he occupies the same position. He doesn't have to ask for deference—it's given. He doesn't have to enforce the hierarchy—it enforces itself around him. But here's what's important: Richard isn't a tyrant in the traditional sense. He's not yelling, he's not overtly cruel. He's charming. He's generous. He buys drinks, he offers his lake house, he compliments people in ways that feel like benediction. And that's what makes him dangerous. Because when someone at the top of the hierarchy is nice, dissent feels like ingratitude. Criticism feels like betrayal. You're not just challenging his behavior—you're rejecting his generosity, his friendship, his care. Richard's role in the system is to be the center of gravity. And as long as he's there, the group has a fixed point. The problem is, fixed points don't tolerate movement. James Farrow — The Conscience / The Scapegoat. James is the one who questions. Not loudly, not constantly, but enough that you notice. He's the one who hesitates when everyone else is nodding. He's the one who names the thing no one else wants to say. And in a system built on consensus and performance, that makes him both necessary and dangerous. James gets cast as the tragic heroes—Hamlet, Brutus, the men who are torn between loyalty and conscience. And offstage, he's living that same tension. He loves the group. He needs the group. But he's also the only one who seems capable of stepping outside the shared reality long enough to see it for what it is. His role is to absorb the group's moral anxiety. When everyone else is rationalizing, James is the one who quietly carries the doubt. And that makes him vulnerable, because the group can only tolerate so much doubt before it starts to feel like a threat. Oliver Marks — The Observer (and the Unreliable Center). Oliver is the narrator, and that’s the most important thing to understand about him. He's not the protagonist in the sense of driving the action—he's the lens. He's the one who watches, who notices, who remembers. He gets cast in the secondary roles, the loyal friends, the sidekicks. And offstage, that's exactly what he is. He's adjacent to power, never quite holding it himself. Oliver's role is to witness and to preserve the group's mythology. He's the one who will tell the story later, who will shape the narrative, who will decide what gets remembered and what gets forgotten. And that makes him both the most trustworthy and the least trustworthy person in the room, because his entire identity is built on being the person who sees and remembers. And when your role is to preserve the story, you have a vested interest in making sure the story makes sense—even if that means editing out the parts that don't fit. Oliver's unreliability isn't about lying. It's about narrative coherence. He's spent so long being the supporting character in other people's stories that he doesn't know how to tell his own without making it sound like it was always meant to go this way. Alexander Vass — The Skeptic / The Threat Detector. Alexander is the one person in the constellation who never fully buys the mythology. If Richard is gravity, Alexander is friction. He reads the room in a way that makes everyone else uncomfortable, because he notices the things they’re trying not to name: the way praise can be a leash, the way a joke can be a warning, the way “we’re just rehearsing” can turn into “we’re practicing how to lie.” Functionally, Alexander’s role is to keep the group honest—except the group doesn’t actually want honesty. It wants coherence. It wants the story where they’re brilliant, chosen, and bound by something higher than ordinary morality. Alexander threatens that story simply by staying slightly outside it. He doesn’t melt into the Shakespeare the way the others do. He treats the performance like craft, not like religion. And in a system built on shared belief, the skeptic isn’t just annoying—he’s contagious. That’s why Alexander becomes a pressure valve and a danger sign at the same time. When things are calm, he can say what everyone’s thinking and get a laugh. When things are not calm, the same instinct reads as betrayal. In groupthink terms, he’s the potential dissenter: the person whose presence proves dissent is possible. And the group has to decide whether to tolerate that…or neutralize it. Wren — The Keeper of the Peace / The Emotional Manager. Wren’s function isn’t power. It’s regulation. She’s the one who smooths the room, who senses the mood shift before it becomes a fight, who turns a sharp comment into a joke, who makes sure no one storms out too early. In a normal friend group, that’s just emotional intelligence. In this group, it becomes infrastructure. Because when you have a hierarchy as intense as Dellecher’s, someone has to manage the fallout. Someone has to keep the performance going even when the actors are cracking. Wren does that work. She helps maintain the illusion that everyone is fine, that the group is still intact, that what happens onstage stays onstage. And the cost of that role is that she can’t afford to be the person who disrupts the system. She has to be the person who absorbs disruption. So when the temperature rises, Wren’s peacekeeping becomes a kind of quiet complicity. Not because she’s cruel, but because she’s invested in preventing rupture. The keeper of the peace rarely asks, “Is this right?” They ask, “Can we get through tonight?” And that survival mindset is exactly how a group slides from tension into harm. Filippa Kettle — The Lover / The Idealist. Filippa is the emotional amplifier of the constellation. She’s the one who makes the world feel heightened on purpose—more romantic, more tragic, more worth the suffering. If Richard supplies command and James supplies moral gravity, Filippa supplies the aesthetic rationale: the sense that this isn’t just school, it’s art, it’s destiny, it’s something you’re lucky to be inside. Her function in the system is to keep the group in love with itself. She’s the one who can reframe a brutal rehearsal as devotion, a cutting remark as honesty, a boundary as loyalty. And because she believes it—because she actually wants the story to be true—she’s persuasive. In groupthink terms, she helps produce the “moral high ground” the group stands on: the idea that they’re different from ordinary people, therefore ordinary rules don’t apply. That idealism is beautiful…until it becomes a mask. Because when you’re committed to the romance of the thing, you can’t admit the thing is rotten without losing your whole identity. Filippa shows you how easily love becomes a defense mechanism—and how quickly an idealist can become an apologist when the plot turns. Meredith — The Wildcard / The Truth-Teller. Meredith’s role in the constellation is volatility. She’s the one who says the quiet part out loud, not because she’s brave in a noble way, but because she’s less invested in the group’s fragile consensus. She can be generous one moment and cruel the next. She can be perceptive and petty in the same sentence. And that unpredictability makes her powerful. Functionally, Meredith tests the group’s boundaries. She’s the living question: “How far can I go and still be loved here?” In a tight, aestheticized group, that’s dangerous because boundary-testing forces the group to reveal what it actually values. When Meredith lashes out, everyone has to decide: do we punish it, excuse it, aestheticize it, or pretend it didn’t happen? The way they respond tells you who really runs the room. And Meredith also reveals something crucial about groupthink: it’s not always calm, polite consensus. Sometimes it’s chaos held together by fear. The wildcard doesn’t break groupthink; she can actually accelerate it by keeping everyone off balance. When you never know what she’ll do, you become more likely to conform, to appease, to keep the peace, to stay quiet. So when you look at the seven as a system, you can see the machine: Richard as apex power, James as moral tension, Oliver as witness and narrative glue, Alexander as dissent potential, Wren as emotional regulation, Filippa as romantic justification, and Meredith as volatility. That’s the constellation. And once you see it, you can predict what happens when pressure hits—because every role has a breaking point. Now let’s talk craft—how Rio builds the spell: voice, pacing, and the motifs doing the heavy lifting. So I’ve just walked through who these people are and what roles they play in the group’s machinery. Now let's talk about how Rio actually built this world on the page—because understanding the system is one thing, but feeling it is another entirely. Here's the key thing: this book doesn't work if you're not seduced by it. Rio needs you to want to be part of this world, at least for a while. She needs you to feel the pull of the language, the intimacy of the rituals, the weight of being chosen. And she does that through three very deliberate craft choices that I want to walk you through, because they're what make this book dangerous in the best possible way. First: voice and distance. Oliver is the narrator, but he’s telling this story from a very specific vantage point—ten years out, after a decade in prison, sitting across from the detective who put him there. That means everything you’re hearing has been filtered through hindsight, through guilt, through the corrosive effects of isolation and obsession. He’s not giving you the raw, chaotic experience of his fourth year at Dellecher. He’s giving you the story he’s told himself, over and over, until it’s smooth and self-contained and almost mythic. And that distance is crucial, because it lets Rio do two things at once. On one level, Oliver is hyper-observant. He notices everything—the way James holds himself onstage, the cadence of Meredith's speech, the exact shade of light on the lake. He's the perfect witness, which makes the book feel authoritative and immersive. But on another level, he's deeply unreliable. Not because he's lying—though he is, by omission—but because he's spent a decade constructing a narrative that lets him live with what he did. And that means there are gaps. Moments where he pulls back, where he refuses to name the thing that's right in front of him, where he hides behind a Shakespearean quote instead of admitting the truth. Rio uses that slippage to create tension. You're constantly reading between the lines, trying to figure out what Oliver isn't saying. And because he's so articulate, so thoughtful, so goddamn literary, it's easy to trust him. Which makes it all the more devastating when you realize how much he's been withholding—from Colbourne, from the reader, from himself. Second: the language itself. This is a book about people who speak almost entirely in someone else's words, and Rio leans into that hard. The students quote Shakespeare constantly—not just in performance, but in conversation, in argument, in moments of crisis. And it does exactly what you'd expect: it makes them sound smart, cultured, connected to something bigger than themselves. But it also makes them sound hollow. Because when you're always performing someone else's script, you stop having access to your own interiority. You stop being able to say "I'm scared" or "I don't know what to do" because those aren't lines you've been given. And Rio shows you how that works by contrasting the Shakespearean dialogue with Oliver's narration. In the present-tense scenes—the ones set during his fourth year—the characters speak in this heightened, almost mannered way. But in the frame narrative, when Oliver is talking to Colbourne, his voice is quieter, more direct, more stripped down. It's like he's finally learning to speak without a script. Except, of course, he's not. Because even in the frame, even ten years later, he's still performing. He’s still performing the role of the contrite convict. He’s still telling the story the way it needs to be told to make sense of the choices he made. Third: pacing and withheld information. Rio structures this book like a slow-burn thriller, which is a bold choice for a literary novel about theater students. But it works because she understands that the real suspense isn't "who did it"—we know from page one that someone died and Oliver took the fall. The suspense is "why." What could possibly make someone confess to a crime they didn't commit? What kind of love, or guilt, or brokenness, would drive that choice? So Rio withholds. She gives you pieces of the night Richard died, but never the full picture. She shows you the aftermath—the panic, the cover-up, the fracturing of the group—but she makes you wait for the actual moment of violence. And when it finally comes, it's not cathartic. It's messy and ugly and almost anticlimactic, because of course it is. Real violence isn't dramatic. It's just sad. But what makes the pacing sing is the way Rio uses the Five-Act structure to control the release of information. Each Act has its own revelation, its own turning point, and she lets those moments breathe. She doesn't rush you. She lets you sit with the dread, with the knowledge that something terrible is coming and there's nothing anyone can do to stop it. It's Shakespearean in the truest sense—not because of the language, but because of the inevitability. You know how this ends. The tragedy is watching it happen anyway. Now, I want to name one motif that runs through all of this, because it's the thing that makes the craft choices cohere into something bigger. Mirrors. This book is obsessed with mirrors—literal ones, like the shattered bathroom mirror James stands in front of after Richard's death, or the mirrored floor of the King Lear set that makes Oliver think of the frozen lake. But also metaphorical ones. The way the students mirror the characters they play. The way Oliver mirrors James, always one step behind, always watching. The way the group mirrors itself, creating a closed loop where everyone reflects everyone else and no one can see outside. And that's the craft move that makes this book stick. Rio doesn't just tell you that these people are trapped in their roles. She shows you, through structure and voice and imagery, how the trap was built. How language becomes a cage. How performance becomes identity. How the mirror becomes the only reality you know. So when you're reading this book, pay attention to the moments when Oliver stops narrating and starts quoting. Pay attention to the scenes where the dialogue feels too polished, too rehearsed. Pay attention to the reflections—literal and figurative—because that's where Rio is showing you the truth Oliver can't quite say out loud. Now that I’ve broken down the mechanism, let’s talk about the cost—and what Act I is actually proving. Alright—let’s land this Act I episode, and set up where Act II takes us next. So I’ve walked through the world, the people, the system, and how Rio built it all on the page. Now let's land the plane on Act I. What does all of this add up to, and why should you keep listening? Here's what Act I proves: this is a book about people who wanted to be extraordinary so badly that they stopped being human. They traded their voices for Shakespeare's lines, their identities for roles, their morality for the thrill of the performance. And Rio shows you, step by step, how that trade gets made. Not in one big moment, but in a thousand small ones. Every time they quote Hamlet instead of saying what they actually feel. Every time they let Richard's cruelty slide because confronting him would break the spell. Every time they choose the group over themselves. And the tragedy—because this is a tragedy, even if it takes five acts to get there—is that they don't see it happening. Or maybe they do, and they just don't care. Because being part of this world, being chosen, being inside the Castle with the brandy and the lake and the roles that matter, feels worth it. Until it isn't. Act I is Rio's thesis statement. It's her way of saying: here's the contract you sign when you walk through the doors of Dellecher. Here's what you gain, and here's what you lose. And by the time you realize the cost, you're already in too deep to walk away. So if you're still here, you're ready for Act II. Because now that I’ve seen how the system works, I’m about to watch it turn on them. The roles that felt like freedom are about to become cages. The language that felt like art is about to become a weapon. And the group that felt like family is about to become a jury. Act II is where the teeth come out. Let’s go.