I'm in Love with the Villainess (Light Novel)

The premise is what made me buy the book, naturally. I do like the isekai twist of reincarnating into the villain, and this double twist of romancing the villain instead is fresh (at least as far as I'm aware at the moment). So I cracked this open and started reading. Immediately, I'm confronted with the glaring weakness of the light novel format: worldbuilding. Most light novels overcome this obstacle by starting slow or hitting you with a lot of tropes really fast to get the worldbuilding ball rolling. This novel dumps me into a fairly generic world and doesn't do much to get me invested in it. The romance is presented without any build up, so I'm not invested in that either yet. However, I wanted to give the book a chance, so I kept reading. Cue the hard left turn into the Age of Revolution. The common people are in revolt. There's a background power struggle between them, the church, and the state. Now I need to know where this is going, even if it's just the tale of two people living through troubled times. Anyway, I'm starting to actually like the villainess by the end of the book, although MC-chan is still a little bland (which, yeah, isekai, I should take that as granted until proven otherwise). That's enough for me to care about the romance and characters, so I'll move on to the next book. tldr; Needs more worldbuilding/character development to get fully invested in the setting, but the background events are enough to have me curious as to where this is going.

I'm genuinely surprised how good this series is! Just for reading a couple of minutes, I was hooked by how our main character, Rae Taylor, acts towards her waifu Claire Francois! Rae's interactions with Claire is what sold me on this series. If you want a fun, light hearted romance story with an mc with a personality to boot, then I wholly recommend this!

I've been a fan since of the series since its Webnovel debut and bought this book to further support the author. This version still retain the fun and charm that make me love the series despite several issue (typo, missing some small detail). Thus if you are of the Yuri genre and was looking for some more than just school setting, I would recommend this. (And check out the fan translation of the Webnovel if possible)