It's disturbing and beautiful and ugly and compelling, all at the same time. Like a grand jeu should be. It highlights how small, thoughtless, inadvertent actions have real and lasting consequences.

It will take me some time to process this. ( )

Originally posted on Just Geeking by.

Content warnings:
This book focuses around a teenage suicide and how it affects the lives of various people. There are scenes of bullying told through flashback scenes from a diary of one of the bullies. There are also scenes featuring misogyny, homophobia and religious persecution throughout.

Please note that this book features a suicide and this review discusses that part of the book. That discussion is the spoiler section of the review.

This would have been a very different review if I had not learned that the author had been seen actively engaging with anti-transgender tweets on Twitter before writing it. I’d already had some misgivings while reading The Betrayals and finding this out about the author confirms some thoughts I had previously dismissed. As a result this review is not completely spoiler free, however, don’t worry I’ll be placing the spoiler section under a spoiler cut, so it can be skipped if wished.

I thoroughly enjoyed Collins’ previous novel, The Binding, a historical fantasy novel which blew me away and was looking forward to more of the same in The Betrayals. In some ways Collins did deliver, with the same twists and turns that kept me on the edge of my seat. I found the whole setting of this one quite confusing, and it took me a while to realise that despite being described as “an arcane and mysterious contest” the grand jeu is a belief system where male students learn to compete against one another to create compositions that are more akin to a type of musical composition than magic. I kept expecting them to get to a point where they would have grand magical duels once they had got through all the theory and philosophy (and there is a lot of both) and it never happened.

The Betrayals is listed as fantasy and honestly, I’m not quite sure why, at best it is alternative historical fiction due to the belief system that shuns Christianity. As a Pagan, I have to admit it was interesting to see a book where there was another leading religion and Christians were the ones being ostracised, although one organised religion is much the same as another as seen by their actions.

Like her previous book, the tangle weave of relationships is at the heart of Collins’ novel and this is the part I need to talk about in detail. This spoils the entire plot of the book, so please do not read any further if you do not want the book spoiled for you.



I went into this novel expecting an LGBTQIA relationship as this was the focus of The Binding and how Collins’ made her name. The Betrayals tells the story of Léo Martin as a disgraced politician returning to his old academy at Montverre. Through diary entries written by Léo during his time as a student the novel flashbacks to when he was at school. We learn how he met a fellow student called Carfax, who he initially clashes with. Carfax is a social outcast, and is bullied by his classmates including Léo. A joint assignment forces the two boys to work together and Léo begins to realise how badly he has misunderstood Carfax, recognising his genius and beginning to stand up for him against the other boys.

The boys grow closer, and it becomes evident that they care more for each other than friends, however, intimacy between boys is not socially acceptable and would get them expelled. They do eventually grow close, but Léo submits a piece of work for Carfax’s final assignment assuming he will win. It is an extremely experimental piece and Léo does so without consulting Carfax. It is the wrong decision, and Carfax fails. He leaves, and Léo wins the coveted position they were competing for. He does not get to enjoy it though because the news comes that Carfax has committed suicide.

It is revealed that Claire Dryden, the current and first ever female Magister Lundi of the academy, is in fact Carfax’s sister and went to Montverre in her brother’s stead. Her brother was mentally ill and Claire rushed home to find that he had committed suicide. Having been betrayed and humiliated by Léo and without her brother’s name to reclaim the Carfax identity, she disappeared under her own identity again. As the Carfax that Léo fell in love with was a woman, not a man the homosexual relationship that Collins alludes to in the flashbacks does not actually exist. When I read The Betrayals and got to this big reveal I felt ill. I had already started to realise that Claire must have been at the academy and thought that perhaps Carfax was transgender. I realise now that Collins probably would never have considered that idea.

The girl pretends to be a boy to attend a male only school trope is nothing new, although usually the girl’s identity is revealed when a romance starts. She doesn’t continue the pretence. While on the one hand we could praise Collins for subverting this trope, I feel we also need to ask whether there was any need for her to set up a gay relationship between Léo and Carfax in the first place when she knew that Carfax was really Claire. As the flashbacks are taken from Léo‘s diary we only get his perspective, and we get it in excruciating teenage detail, filled will all the angst and personal detail that a teenager spills out in a private diary. From Léo‘s perspective he is falling in love with another boy. That is how Collins chooses to portray their relationship to the reader for most of the book.

By the time Léo realises that Claire is Carfax he has already fallen in love with her as a woman. The fact that this happens means that there is no room at all to mention or discuss his sexuality. His sexuality is just completely glossed over and now finding out that Collins has particular ideas about gender I don’t think that was an accident. Especially since this book had very clear feminist overtones as well. It also leaves me feeling that she has used queer pairings in her books (or the illusion of them) to draw in readers, and I’m not here for that. It feels very much like a quota is being ticked off rather than an author who actually cares about the representation of realistic diversity. It’s safe to say that this will be the last book of Collins’ that I’ll be reading.


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I liked her other novel so much that this was a disappointment. The writing style is so engaging and intellectual and satisfying. The world building is too....except for the reason this novel doesn't work which is we as readers never actually get to know what the sport/game actually is. That is frankly rude. It makes the story feel utterly incomplete. Not recommended. ( )

This book started out with such promise, with beautiful writing, insane world building and some really pertinent messages about discrimination.

And then it turned out that this whole time the main woman had been deceiving the main man for YEARS.

This novel in the last 150 pages left a really sour taste in my mouth. The ending was just out of nowhere and I feel like I didn't get a proper resolution, and I just felt like I'd been queerbaited along for the ride and I don't like that feeling at all.

Basically, this could have been amazing. And it wasn't through some interesting writing choices. I'm mad I wasted so much time reading this. ( )

Leo's story starts and ends with a spider web; he destroys one so he can be first to arrive at his new school, Montverre.[p. 24] At the end of the book, "Instinctively he starts to swipe [the web] away, to get a better view of the trees and the slope below; but something makes him pause. It's beautiful." [p. 394]

Collins explains that her book is inspired by Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game; reading about Hesse's book, you can see the connections. The ending is satisfying, but I want to know what happens next. The alternate world seems like Fascist Germany and I worry that there is nowhere to escape to. ( )