By Inori and Hanagata. Released in Japan as “Heimin no Kuse ni Namaikina!” by GL Bunko. Released in North America by Seven Seas. Translated by Kevin Ishizaka.
(This does spoil the spinoff’s one big reveal, but not till after the picture.)
And so the I’m in Love with the Villainess story comes to an end once more – this time, apparently, for good, as the author says there are no plans to do a Claire POV for Book 3-5 of the original series. Which makes sense, because while there’s a lot of great stuff happening in those books, Claire’s character arc is the focus of this spinoff, and it comes to its head here. We see Clire’s determination in ferreting out the corrupt nobles, her horror at discovering her father is seemingly behind them all, and her stubborn nobility coming to the fore when she decides the best thing to do is to die for the sake of her country. Fortunately, things play out like the original series, so she’s free to marry Rae and have incredibly embarrassing naked apron incidents near the end of the book. And of course we have the side characters. Loretta and Pepi get resolved as well, of course. And then there’s… um… what was her name again?
I’m not going to summarize the main events of the novel, as we’ve read them before, from Rae’s perspective, in the original series. Interspersed with this we get POV scenes from others. I’ll discuss Catherine’s in a bit. Dole gets a brief scene where we learn about where his dedication to wiping out corrupt nobility came from, as well as his belief that he’s already going to hell for what he’s done. Pepi gets to defend the academy from the revolution, as well as try to figure out how to protect Loretta and not see her die. We see Manaria’s POV of what happened when she returned home, as well as what made her come back at just the right time. Lene and Misha also get scenes showing what they did during the revolution, and their own complicated thoughts on it. Loretta gets to deal with life post-nobility and the chance of a new love. And we get a flashback to Melia’s last moments, where she may not return to Claire’s birthday party but she manages to save… well, let’s talk.
There are two big things about Catherine’s plotline, and I’m going to talk about both of them, so apologies to those who haven’t read the book yet. The first, and most “normal”, is that she, as a child assassin trained by her awful father, was the one who killed Claire’s mother, something which has haunted her and crushed her with guilt ever since, especially because Melia ends up saving her life. Needless to say, Claire is a bit poleaxed when she discovers this. My favorite part of the book, though, was the revelation that Catherine can erase memories, and does so in order to protect Claire and escape from the academy. I love this because I’ve spent this entire series wondering how it is that we see Catherine with Claire so often and she never appeared in the main series at all. I was chalking it up, of course, to “because this hadn’t been written yet, duh”, but there’s a better reason now. Catherine literally wrote herself out of the narrative! It’s only after the main story has resolved that Manaria can deus ex machina things to try to once again meet her, and even then we still don’t see it. Catherine exists at the edge of the novels, a ghost in the pages who then walks off the back cover… along with her maid, because try as she might, there are SOME things that you simply can’t wipe away in a light novel series, and “saving a girl from certain death and making them into a devoted maid” is one of them.
If you’ve read the original books, this is a terrific addition. If you haven’t read the original books… well, go read them first.
