I never found a reason to care about this series before now, but the new sequel is a vampire story and Mahurin seems to have okay opinions about vampires, so let's go

There's a lot to dislike here - Lou starts out as an unusually hateable protagonist of the 'strong female character' variety (she's violent and crass and Not Like the Other Girls because she wears trousers and swears a lot and disdains the idea of romance); the pacing is insane - this is a trilogy of big-ass books, but the characters go from hating each other, to being in love, back to hate, and back to true love all in this first installment; the prose is ham-fisted (prominently featuring my personal most-hated literary non-technique, where the reader is given enough clues for the answer to a mystery, only for the narration to directly tell the answer immediately afterwards, just in case the reader was too stupid to figure it out for herself); the setting is a fantasy world but inexplicably it's also just late-medieval France, including Catholicism (it's not even fantasy Catholicism!). For a story that is entirely about the church's persecution of witches, the religious history and beliefs of this world are strangely underdeveloped - the book seems to assume that nothing really needs to be explored in-depth because the reader will already be familiar enough with the pop-culture fanfic version of Christianity that is typical in modern YA (as well as my favourite "ancient" "historical" pagan religion, the 20th century Triple Moon Goddess, lmao), but there's just enough tweaking to make me want to know more - they celebrate Christmas, which is still called "Christmas" but it's only a commemoration of a miracle of St Nicholas, and not the birth of Jesus, who doesn't seem to exist, except "Judas" is still the eponym for a traitor, so there must be some kind of gospel-equivalent...

Amazingly, the book has one single redeeming quality that renders all of these flaws insignificant, which is the fact that, for once in this genre, it actually has a decently-executed theme. 

Admittedly this theme could have been foregrounded a lot better than it was, but the bar is so low that I appreciate the fact that it was there at all. Basically, there are two famous stories within the setting which serve as parallels to the main plot about the romance between Lou the witch and Reid the witch-hunter - the founding myth of both the witches and the witch-hunters is a tragedy about a witch who fell in love with a knight, and our enemies-turned-lovers do their bonding over a novel about two characters from enemy kingdoms who fall in love but die saving the world. And it sucks.

This is a big fucking deal because although enemies-to-lovers has been the big trend in fantasy/romance for the past few years (albeit that the definition of 'enemies' has been diluted enough to have become essentially meaningless), none of these popular books that I've read (or read about) have ever really directly engaged with the idea of tragic 'star-crossed lovers' as a literary tradition going back to Pyramus and Thisbe which, in its modern incarnations, has become loaded with all kinds of misogyny and/or racism and/or mental-health-stigma and/or USAmerican military-death-cult weirdness etc etc and which consequently, the book-buying, media-consuming, tiktok-influencing zeitgeist of mostly adult women are currently in revolt against. 

Most of these recently published books which were written in response to the undesirable ending of another specific story (i.e. every Reylo fic over the past 2 years) are contemporary romcoms, which conveniently allows SFF writers/publishers/adapters etc to disregard audience feedback and disappointed expectations about their own work, on the basis that contemporary/romcom fans and SFF fans are separate audiences, rather than a Venn diagram with a very sizeable overlap. 

The handful of Zutara and Dramione/Drarry inspired books (and probably others) that have shown up have tended to be either historical or modern/urban fantasy, but those never get quite as much attention, and are typically marketed as being 'inspired by' rather than shamelessly flaunting the 'fix-it fic' label, so they typically don't have the requisite amount of spiteful energy I need to live. 

This book is in that 'inspired by' category (Nina/Matthias), but it shoves its message in your face and thus feels like it has something to say about the recent state of fantasy/romance as a genre, instead of being just a nice little story in a bubble where the enemies live happily-ever-after for once, and it's fucking great. 

(I see that a bunch of people seem to be mad about the sequels, so if one or both of them dies at the end I swear I will burn the fucking world)