This was a beautifully written book with a gorgeous cover. I was excited to dive in and read. I am glad I read with a group, otherwise I may have given up. This has to be one of the most frustrating books that I have ever read. I spent most of the book trying to understand what was happening. All the talk of the grand jeu, the great game, and even after finishing I am not sure what it is! But I am glad that I kept going as the story did mostly come together. Ultimately, I've barely any idea what this book was about. Go read the description. There's a school, yes. And a love, or loves, sort of? There's a game that is never explained but is entirely central to the book. There's a totalitarian government coming into power, but is never explored. To be honest, it was a combination of factors. I’d just got to the end of a multi-book contract with my first (YA) publishers, and my editor left to go to another publishing house, and I was having a hard time trying to find a good idea for the next book. I kept sending pitches to my agent, and every time she’d say, ‘Yes, that’s great, but is it commercial?’ And in the end my inspiration gave out, and I started to apply for proper jobs, thinking my career was over. But I couldn’t give up on writing, even if I was happy to give up on being a writer – and so I began to write a book for myself, without second-guessing my agent or my publisher or even my reader… That was The Binding, and when I’d finished the first draft I had no idea what sort of book it was, even whether it was YA or adult – so I sent it to the adult and the YA department at my agency and waited to see if either of them was interested!

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. 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. Also there was a girl who lived in the walls of the school and called herself The Rat and I have no more to say about that.

Bridget Collins Press Reviews

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… I wanted to read The Betrayals based on my love of The Binding. This too promised a historical fantasy with a slowburn plot and a romance at the centre. Great, I thought. I’m certain to enjoy it. I so agree with you on the Emile hatred. Seeing him die was so satisfying. I also thought he was going to be revealed as the Rat’s father, but I kind of ended up liking that he wasn’t. I think it proves a point about how he wasn’t the only one to be such a jerk and take advantage of the servants (and women). Like his behavior is almost standardized in this kind of horrible society. Also, I imagined the Rat as an actual rat for most of the first chapter and still had doubts about it after so don’t feel bad 😂 even though this book has the enchanting quality i have come to associate with BC thanks to her debut novel, ‘the binding,’ im still trying to figure out why i didnt love this as much.

But I absolutely love the scene in which they parted! Because it was absolutely obvious that they still loved each other, and because Léo finally realized that, because he loved Claire, he had to respect her decisions and not force his will on her. I’m currently writing my next book, which has a working title of The Silence Factory. It’s about a factory in Victorian England which spins spider silk to produce a fabric that creates silence on one side and crazy-making echoes on the other – it’s about silence, obviously, but also about seduction, moral ambiguity, grief and courage. And last but not least, do you have any must read recommendations for our readers? What’s the last book that kept you up all night? This was the slowest book I've ever read. I would have DNF'd it if it wasn't an ARC, and if people hadn't spoken so highly of The Binding before this. It was painfully boring often, the pretentiously vague tone throughout was stifling, and with no great payoff at the end to cushion the blow. I guessed the big ~twist. Miscommunication was a heavily-used trope. Mental illness is used as a central, yet somehow very dismissed, plot point. I will say that occasionally it grabbed my attention, just enough to keep me going, but there were about three different points where I strongly felt as though the story should be wrapping up - the first of these being before the halfway mark. At the end of the novel, Bridget Collins notes that the story, and particularly her Grand Jeu, was influenced by Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game. Now if I'd remembered my university reading of that book, this one would have made a hell of a lot more sense. My Latin did, finally, come in handy when deciphering 'Magister Ludi' (Master/Teacher of the Game), but that's where my sense of accomplishment ended. The 'grand game' is a complex mix of music and math, philosophy, religion, and life itself, understood by the reader only in the abstract. Unlike us, the students and teachers at Montverre feel the power of the game, working to create the most intricate or clever version in competition with each other. So central is this process of creation that the game becomes more important than any character in the novel. Genre: Ummm – I don’t know? 😅 If I had to describe it, I’d probably call it a very character-driven dark academia/alternate history novel… But that doesn’t really do this book justice! Let’s just say it has a bit of everything, and is literary fiction at its finest 😉A lot is going on with this novel, no doubt, and I’m trying to be as vague as possible to not leave any spoilers. The ending is a bit surprising, even if it is not wholly original (shades of M. Butterfly), and is only successful because it exists in a book. All in all, The Betrayals is a frustrating read to a certain extent because it is so vague and ambiguous — and would be the type of ambiguity that would lead to perversion in John Wayne’s mind, though I seek to make no judgments myself. Again, the setting is not specified, though Collins references France and England as fellow countries in her text. The period of the novel’s setting is similarly vague at best, as mentioned, so we’re never too sure if the fascists are a mirror of the German Nazi party— simply because it is not clear if the story takes place in Germany or not. You have to read a good portion of this novel before it becomes clear that Collins is merely taking liberties with retelling the story of the rise of Nazism in Germany during the ’30s at all — so the book can be rather confusing to say the least. When a car pulls up to deliver some baggage to Montverre early on, you don’t know how the car should look like: modern, or something from another era? I suppose this vagueness is Collins’ way of saying that the story could happen at any time, but the details do matter as they do gradually (sort of) emerge as the story is being told. What I loved about this book was the writing and worldbuilding. Bridget Collins excels at historical fantasies, those ones that lean more on the fantasy side than quite historical. Think C. L. Polk’s Kingston Cycle. And that was definitely the case here. I loved the world that was created, and the writing that built it was just beautiful. It was a book I wanted to savour, just to read that writing for a little while longer. 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.