A freshly dog-eared review
Witch Burnings, Fake Marriage, and a Very Good Coat
I bought this book because of the cover, which I am aware is not a personality trait I should admit to in public, but here we are. I read the first hundred pages in a bathtub that had gone cold around me because I refused to get out and refill it, and by the time I finally stood up, pruney and irritated at myself, I already knew I was going to finish it in one more sitting. That’s the trick of Serpent & Dove. It is not a perfect book. It might not even be a very disciplined book. But it knows exactly one thing extremely well, and that thing is chemistry, and chemistry is the one ingredient you cannot fake your way around in this genre.
| Author | Shelby Mahurin |
| Published | 2019 |
| Genre | Fantasy romance, witch hunters vs. witches |
| Format | First book in a trilogy (Serpent & Dove, Blood & Honey, Gods & Monsters) |
| Reception | A genuine word-of-mouth hit, especially once it caught on with the BookTok crowd, though critics and longtime fantasy readers have always been split on the plotting and pacing |
| Our rating | 3.5/5 |
| Read it if | you want banter-first enemies-to-lovers with a Gothic French-flavored city and don’t mind a saggy middle |
| Skip it if | you need airtight worldbuilding logic or you’re allergic to insta-tension romance tropes |
A witch, a witch hunter, and a wedding neither of them wanted
Here’s the setup, and it’s a good one even if you’ve seen versions of it before. Lou is a witch hiding in plain sight in Cesarine, a city that runs on burning women like her at the stake for entertainment. Reid is a Chasseur, one of the church’s witch hunters, a guy who has built his entire identity around the idea that witches are evil and he is not going to be the exception that breaks the rule. Through a chain of bad luck and worse decisions, the two of them end up married. Not romantically married. Legally, inconveniently, we-have-to-share-a-house married.
I love a forced proximity setup and this is a good one, mostly because Mahurin doesn’t rush it. Lou is not a soft, apologetic heroine waiting to be redeemed. She’s sarcastic, she steals things, she flirts with danger because it’s more fun than being careful, and she is lying to her husband about the single biggest fact of her existence. Reid is rigid in the way that always signals a guy who is about to have his whole worldview taken apart brick by brick, and watching that happen to him is genuinely satisfying, not because he’s dumb but because Mahurin lets his faith and his decency both be real things he has to reckon with, not just obstacles to romance.
The banter is the best part. The plot is the part I’d cut
Look, I need to be honest about something. The first act of this book is close to perfect for what it’s trying to be. The dialogue between Lou and Reid crackles, there’s a scene early on involving a chemise and a very awkward shared bath situation that made me laugh out loud on public transit like a lunatic, and the tension between “I am supposed to hate you” and “I cannot stop noticing your hands” is handled with real skill. Mahurin understands that the best enemies-to-lovers isn’t about hatred, it’s about two people who keep accidentally being honest with each other when they meant to be guarded.
Then the middle happens, and I have to be the friend who tells you the truth: it sags. There’s a stretch involving Lou’s past and a witch community subplot that introduces a lot of new characters and mythology very quickly, and I found myself flipping back to double check names more than once. The worldbuilding, the actual rules of how the witches’ magic works, how the church’s power structure functions, why this specific city burns witches when apparently others don’t, felt sketched in rather than built. I wanted the same rigor the romance got. I didn’t get it. Some readers don’t care, because they’re here for Lou and Reid, and honestly by the last hundred pages neither did I, but it’s a real crack in the foundation and I’d be lying if I pretended otherwise.
The side characters are a mixed bag too. Coco and Ansel both have moments that land, especially Ansel’s arc, but Beau exists mostly to create a love triangle shaped shadow that the book never fully commits to, which made me wonder if an editor asked for him more than the story needed him. That’s my one real tangent: I think this book would be stronger by twenty percent if it trusted its central couple enough to cut the extra weight around them.
Where it actually got me
There’s a scene near the end, after a betrayal that I won’t spoil, where Reid has to choose between everything he’s been taught and the one person who made him question it, and Mahurin writes his stillness so well. Not a big speech. Just a man standing very quietly while his entire life reorganizes itself. I read that chapter on a plane with my phone dead and no charger and I remember being almost grateful, because it meant I had nothing to do but sit with it for a minute before turning the page.
Am I rating this higher than it strictly earns on craft alone? Maybe a little. I know plenty of readers who bounced hard off the mythology and never came back, and I can’t fully argue with them. But I’m rating the experience of reading it, cold bathwater and dead plane battery included, and that experience was genuinely fun in a way a lot of more “correct” fantasy novels aren’t.
The best enemies-to-lovers stories aren’t about two people learning to stop hating each other. They’re about two people who were never as sure of their hatred as they claimed to be.
About Shelby Mahurin
Shelby Mahurin is a former nurse turned novelist, which honestly explains a lot about how unsentimental she’s willing to be about violence and consequence in this series. Serpent & Dove was her debut, and it did the thing every debut author dreams about: it found its readers through pure word of mouth and turned into a full trilogy people actually finished, which in this genre is not nothing. She writes with a clear love for morally torn characters and a French-Gothic aesthetic that shows up in every corner of Cesarine, from the church spires to the witch markets.
If this wrecked you, read these next
If you burned through this in a weekend, try A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness for a slower, more academic take on witches and forbidden attraction. Kingdom of the Wicked by Kerri Maniscalco scratches the same itch for morally messy romance wrapped in religious imagery. And if it was specifically the enemies-to-lovers banter that got you, A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas will hand you more of that in a bigger, messier package. You can grab a copy of the book itself here on Amazon if you want to see what all the bathtub fuss was about.
For your book club
- Lou lies to Reid for most of the book. At what point, if any, did you stop being frustrated with her for it?
- Reid’s faith is central to his identity. Did the book handle his crisis of belief with real weight, or did it feel like a plot device to get him to the romance faster?
- Do you think the witch hunter society is portrayed as a broken institution, or as individually bad men in an otherwise reasonable system? Does the book seem to know the difference?
- Which side character (Coco, Ansel, Beau) do you think got shortchanged by the plot, and what would you have given them instead?
- Enemies to lovers lives or dies on chemistry. What’s the single scene that sold you on Lou and Reid, or the one that lost you?
Still thinking about Cesarine?
So am I, honestly, mostly about that bath scene. If you want more books that made us argue with ourselves about the rating, go dig through more of our book reviews and find your next obsession.