Personal rating: 4 stars Goodreads rating at time of review: 3.99 stars Content rating: PG-13 Trigger warnings: Abusive parents, stalker, manipulation Seventeen-year-old fangirl Rosemary Collins lives for VIGIL & ANTE Studios movies. From action-packed superhero fights to sweet character moments, she’s here for it all. But in a real-life crossover no one saw coming, the fandom’s heartthrob supervillain, Ironfall, isn’t as fictional as the film studio wants her to believe. Beyond the glamorous red carpet lies the government’s most guarded secret: the movies are real. Armed with a devilish grin and a wit as sharp as his knives, Ironfall needs her help, and refusing means he’ll kill her parents. Her only other option involves spying on him for the government’s secret superhero division. Suspended between fact and what she thought was fiction, Rosemary must join her heroes and create an impenetrable web of lies—or guarantee her parents’ safety as she watches the world burn at its adored villain’s hand. (goodreads.com) As someone who was reading and writing fanfics around 2012 - 2018 (aka the heyday of Avengers fanfiction in my personal opinion), I have read many, many stories with this premise before. And let’s be real, I gobbled them up every time I came across them regardless of how well they were written or how annoying the main character was. Marvel movies come to life? Sign me up for that adventure (at least in the sense of reading about it, I’d prefer the MCU to stay in its own universe, thank you). All of that being said, I know that the writing of this book could have used some polishing. I know that there were parts of it that were cringey and unrealistic and maybe a touch too try-hard. I am not claiming this to be a great piece of literature… however I had an absolute blast reading it and therefore I am giving it four stars. You can’t stop me, this is my blog. I did, in fact, breeze through this book in one sitting, shouting at the characters all the way through it and rolling my eyes at the particularly fanfic-y parts (even though you know I loved those too). It was a very easy read to get into with short chapters, simple writing, familiar tropes. If you, like me, have read fanfictions with the same premise before, you know where things are going right from the get go, but you’re excited to get there. Handsome villain stalking the main character? Here for it. Main character has to go through a training montage? Obviously. Secret government organization convinces the main character to spy on the villain that she’s slowly falling for? I would expect nothing less. Plot that starts to fall apart and meander aimlessly after the author has already written the scene that they were originally daydreaming about? Listen… we’ve all been there. Okay, okay, I admit, the plot was maybe structured a bit too much like a fanfiction. And I am going solely off of my own fanfic writing experience on this one, but what I mean is this: as a fangirl in a fandom, sometimes you daydream about a particular scene that you would like to see play out either in the canon content or with your OC or whatever. You can just picture your favorite character dancing or getting coffee or murdering all of your enemies because they dared to lay a finger on you. And, if you are a writer, your instinct may be to write it all down so that you can revisit that daydream whenever you want. The only problem is, if you are a writer, you might also be inclined to justify that one scene with an entire plot because how else would the characters have gotten there? So you write a fic, but after you get to the point in the story that your original scenario occurs, you start to run out of steam and then things start to go down rabbit holes that you dug in the middle of things and maybe even get ever so slightly convoluted until you either wrap things up or leave the fic on hiatus for the next ten years. At least… in my experience that’s what tends to happen. And it kind of feels like that’s what happens in this book as well. After the main character, Rosemary, and the “villain”, Ironfall, start to get closer and the heist plot starts to wrap up, that’s when the evil terrorist group shows up along with the plot twists that were maybe too heavily foreshadowed before. Still, I think everything wrapped up nicely at the end with an epilogue “post-credit scene” to boot. You can tell that the author put a lot of work in to tie all of the various plot threads together and I appreciate that. I think part of the reason I enjoyed We Could be Villains so much is because it brought me back to that fun time in the Avengers fandom. Rosemary describes eagerly waiting to hear news from convention panels and watch trailers. She and her friend talk about theories together and have posters. Ironfall is very “Loki-coded”, but the weird teenage version of Loki that many fics at the time adopted because then they could get away with having their 17 year old OC fall in love with him and claim it wasn’t creepy because of that one tumblr post that did some math and proposed that Loki is only a teenager in human years (iykyk). It’s just all nostalgic to me in a weird way. Were I not so embedded in Avengers fandom culture in my youth (*cough* and maybe also now *cough*), I don’t think I would have enjoyed this book as much as I did. While I think it can stand on its own and that others would enjoy it, I definitely think the plotting needs a bit of help and the characters could use some fine tuning. There was also a random side plot about Rosemary and Ironfall being part of the school production of Beauty and the Beast, which I found funny, but was kind of out of place. (Also, I’m still wondering how Rosemary was allowed to be in the play even though she hardly went to any of her actual classes. Don’t public schools have rules about not being able to participate in extracurriculars if your grades are low?) This review is getting long and rambling. To summarize: would I recommend this book to others? Uh…. undecided. Depends on what your own history with the MCU and fanfiction is. Will I be reading the sequel when it is released? You can bet your buns I will. Thank you for sticking with me to the end of the line, or at least the end of this review. I’d better go to a coffee shop and hope no villains and/or super spies are following me. Until next time! Image source: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61101765-we-could-be-villains
0 Comments
|
Categories
All
Archives
April 2024
|