The Betrayals tells the tale of the ongoings at the all male school Montverre, that practices the beloved grand jeu, meanwhile exploring outside impact on the school from an increasingly hostile society.

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. This entire novel was an evocative infusion of gothic atmosphere and dark academia vibes. I adored the exploration of this mysterious setting and only wished the reader was able to garner more of an understanding of the academy and the games its students were tasked with creating. The novel tells the tale of elitism and a growing dystopian government prosecuting certain factions of society that aren’t the wealthy, Catholics or men. It’s infecting infrastructure, such as Montverre, with their conservative views and threatening the essence of the fantastical world within its walls.

The book spends a great deal of time on Carfax's school life, his relationship with Leo, his personality, wants and fears, all through the eyes of Leo. I really enjoyed meeting Carfax and I absolutely wept when we saw how badly bullied he was (Chapter 13 I found particularly painful). And out of all the characters in the book, including the three different narrators, the one I thought I knew most was Carfax.

Also, can we just talk about all the commentary on a women’s role in academia? So many of the snide remarks Claire experienced and the way she constantly had to prove she was better than her male peers, just so that she would be taken seriously at all, throws a lot of light on our own history. And maybe not even just history. As a girl studying a STEM subject, it’s kind of hard not to notice that there’s only a single female professor in our whole department, and that a noticeable majority of my fellow math students are guys… Of course, that’s still way better than actively being discouraged from studying at all, just because of your sex, but it just goes to show that it takes time for remnants of a system that barred women from university to fade altogether…. [For context, the first German university to allow women to study there was Heidelberg in 1895.] The book alludes to and explores a variety of mental health. The sense of loss of a loved one and the grief left behind, deteriorating mental health, the impact and consequence of bullying and subsequent suicide. All of these points in the overarching theme were handled and established extremely well, where when appropriate and provoked enough, had my heart heavy and my blood boiling. Which is why it just didn’t sit right with me that Léo would want to start something with Carfax’s sister and see her as some kind of replacement for her brother. I could never, ever get behind Léo and Claire as a couple – unless, of course, Claire was Carfax all along. Unless part of Léo somehow recognized who she was, even though he didn’t consciously know it at the time. Unless he was so entranced with Claire because she was Carfax, and everything Léo had loved about him, he could also see in her. So why am I giving it 3 stars? Because there's one thing that I was hoping it was going to happen since the very beginning and it actually did happen! There were moments where I was about to lose hope and I was thinking that maybe my crazy theories had gotten the better of me, so I was so happy to read that I was right to believe in this theory.And I did enjoy it. I definitely liked the story, namely the writing and worldbuilding, granted, but I liked it. I just didn’t like it as much as I was hoping to. Dystopian Fiction Books Everyone Should Read: Explore The Darker Side of Possible Worlds and Alternative Futures My main criticism however is with the character reveal of Carfax (and hence why this review is marked 'spoiler'). Throughout the book we are told two things about Carfax: And, finally, before this monstrosity of a comment gets any longer – I’m also thrilled I loved this! 🤗🤗 Thanks again for bringing it to my attention, I definitely owe you now! 🤣

All this vagueness creates a sense of detachment between the reader and the characters. I found it impossible to care about Léo and Claire when there was so much ambiguity surrounding everything else. The focus is mostly on their relationship but there’s nothing compelling about it seeing as neither of them are particularly likeable. The decision to have Claire BE Carfax sat very strangely with me. The way it was handled felt very off. The trope of 'woman disguises herself as a man to attend something she wouldn't be able to as a woman' is as old as time, and in this scenario felt extremely trite and uninspired. Perhaps if there had been any nuance whatsoever in regards to how the narrative interacted with gender, instead of the heavy-handed mess that we got, this plot line could have worked better. The Betrayals is a beautiful dystopian romance about coming of age as an artist and the love affair artistic collaboration can be, while also being an acute political novel about the fate of spiritual values in a totalitarian system. A rich delight' Sandra NewmanThe 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. Speaking of the role of women in society, though, I also really want to talk about The Rat! Or more specifically, her mother and Emile. At first, when there were hints that Emile knew someone in the servants’ quarters, I was inclined to like him. After all, he was also the only one who still reached out to Léo after he had been exiled. Surely, he couldn’t be too bad? But then, when he met past-Léo in the servants’ wing that one night and when he started planting doubts in Léo’s minds about his relationship with Carfax, I started seriously disliking him. The more we saw of him, it became apparent what a manipulative and egotistical jerk he was, and it didn’t come as a surprise to me at all that The Rat’s mother had killed herself because of him. [Although I actually thought for a very long time that The Rat was probably Emile’s daughter and that her mother killed herself once Emile found out The Rat existed – so my sleuthing skills did get a few things wrong 🧐😜]