Disowned But Not Disheartened! Life Is Good with Overpowered Magic, Vol. 1

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By Riko Saiki and Baracan. Released in Japan as “Ie wo Oidasaremashita ga, Genki ni Kurashiteimasu: Cheat na Mahou to Zensei Chishiki de Kaiteki Benri na Second Life!” by Kadokawa Books. Released in North America by J-Novel Club. Translated by Grant U.

Sometimes you get an author who doesn’t quite get why a thing is popular. They see that the Narou site has a lot of those “Cinderella” style light novels these days, starring a girl who’s been through a lot but things get better for her. Add a touch of isekai and otome game, and you’ve got an automatic winner, right? Except no, you actually have to put in the work. You cannot simply have three to four pages of tragic backstory and then have our heroine be absolutely fine the rest of the book. What’s more, you have to actually have a heroine. Plucky girl is not enough by itself, she needs to somehow grow and change throughout the book. Unfortunately, this is one of those books where the author did not get the memo. And as a result, we’re left with someone who would never be disheartened, because honestly, everything goes their way. What if Cinderella grew up with the prince?

When she’s three years old, Tafelina develops a rare mana destabilization… and then suddenly her hair and eyes change color. Naturally, her father reacts to this the only way he can: by strapping a three-year-old to the side of a horse and letting it run out of his territory. Fortunately, when we meet her, now nicknamed Lera, she’s been rescued by her uncle and has grown up in the earldom of Peylon, which she describes as being full of “meatheads” but is, in reality, filled with powerful monster slayers and magical geniuses… none more so than Lera herself, whose memories from her past life in Japan (come on, you can’t say you’re surprised) allow her to come up with amazing invention ideas that research teams can turn into money makers. Now she’s thirteen, and what do all teenagers do in books like these? They go to the academy, of course.

I kept being annoyed at the way this book did things. The Cinderella amounts to the prologue and one point in the main story where she’s shown to an attic by a prejudiced dorm head. Other than that, she’s got an adopted family who adore her, friends who admire her, and a knight who seemingly falls in love with her at first sight and is asking if she’s engaged yet. Those who dislike her are all evil cartoons, particularly the “other” Tafelina, who her father brought in to replace her after running her out of town on a mare. Most annoyingly, Lera doesn’t have enough of a personality to carry a book like this. She’s already super powerful, so doesn’t really learn much in classes, and she rarely gets angry or overexcited about anything, so we’re mostly left with a narrative “meh”. The one big conflict we’re promised, the downfall of her birth family, doesn’t happen, and is clearly being saved for Book 2.

Even the names in this book are annoying and hard to remember. Skip it.

A Cozy Life in the Woods with the White Witch, Vol. 1

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By MOJIKAKIYA and syow. Released in Japan as “Shiro Majo-san to no Henkyō Gurashi ~Saikyō na Majo wa Nonbiri Kurashitai~” by Kadokawa Books. Released in North America by J-Novel Club. Translated by Amanogawa Tenri.

I wasn’t originally going to try this series – again, contrary to popular belief, I don’t read everything – but I decided to pick it up after I saw it was from the author of My Daughter Left the Nest and Returned an S-Ranked Adventurer, which I quite enjoyed. That one had the author trying out the “raise a daughter that they picked up somewhere” mini-genre, though thankfully without the “and then marry them” part of that same genre. This seems to have the author trying out another genre to write in, that being the “slow life” type, though there’s also a dash of “kicked out of the party” to start us off. It’s very good at the slow life too, for good and ill. Good because I’m not really a fan of “I try to have a slow life but have to keep saving the world” books. Bad because the first half is really pretty boring. And if you’re waiting for our protagonist to do something OP, keep waiting.

Tori is part of the Platinum Adventurer group the Muddy Four Horns. That said, he’s not really a fighter, so provides backline support for them, such as cooking and cleaning. When they decide to combine several parties into one big elite one, Tori is informed by the guild manager and the rest of his party (who seem a bit reluctant) that he’s fired. As he walks along after this, he runs into a huge elderly woman, the famous White Witch, who has literally come looking for him, in order to put her life in order. Despite attempting to be bitter and sarcastic about it, Tori is whisked away to her cottage… where he finds that a) the huge elderly White Witch is a disguise, and she’s actually young and cute; and b) she’s an utter slob and her cottage is a disaster area. But a job is a job, so he gets down to work.

This feels kind of like the gender reverse of a typical shoujo manga, where a bunch of men sleep, eat, fight and make messes until a girl comes into their lives, cleans up, and forces them to straighten up. Fortunately for us, there’s no harem antics here – mostly as Euphemia, the witch, makes it very clear to her other familiars that Tori is HERS. The love story starts off a bit forced, in my opinion, mostly held back by Tori’s self-hatred and Euphemia’s lack of emotional knowledge, but her solution to “how to get him to stay with me forever” not only drives the rest of the book but amused me. If you’re going to attract a man, go big and solve ALL his friend’s problems so he never worries about them again. The other surprise is that Tori is not involved in any of the action – there’s quite a few battles here, especially at the climax, but Tori really DOES have no really good combat ability, as opposed to others in the genre, and so he stays home, cooks, and cleans. And as a reward he gets a hot witch girlfriend. This is still a title written for teenage boys.

Theoretically, this could easily be a one-shot, as it wraps everything up, but there’s a second volume coming, so I guess we’ll see. This isn’t as good as My Daughter Left the Nest, but it isn’t too bad.

The Tanaka Family Reincarnates, Vol. 1

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By Choko and kaworu. Released in Japan as “HTanaka-ke, Tensei Suru” by Dragon Novels. Released in North America by J-Novel Club. Translated by Sasha Schiller.

OK, this was an absolute hoot. I suspected I would enjoy it when I first saw the license announcement, but I wasn’t aware just how much fun I would have. It’s not perfect, but the things that annoyed me are things that I tend to get annoyed at in most light novels, rather than being unique to this one (obsession with large breasts by the heroine, the lolicon stuff). Our heroine is fun, the family in general is in that “stupidly competent” genre, where people tend to magically be fantastic at everything and solve everyone’s problems while being blissfully unaware of it. There’s also a really good and deadly serious fight in the third quarter of the book, allowing the author to show that this isn’t just going to be for laughs. I even enjoyed the worldbuilding, which at first suggests this family is reincarnated from our Japan, but as the volume goes on we realize that our Japan is not quite as cat-obsessed as the Tanakas’ Japan, and that something has it in for our heroine.

The Tanakas, consisting of the 65-year-old parents and their three middle-aged children, are sitting down to dinner at the daughter’s condo when they are all killed by what seems to be a massive earthquake. Minato, the daughter and our protagonist, wakes up to find that she is now Emma, a cute 11-year-old noble who is absolutely obsessed with bugs. To her surprise, she finds that Emma’s younger brother William is her own younger brother… and yes, the rest of their family are all Tanakas as well. They’re actually quite wealthy, thanks to their silkworm cultivating, but they’re located, for the moment, out in the sticks. And now they all have past memories, particularly Emma, who was eccentric in Japan and is even more so here, and she’s going to take this new world by storm… after finding a pet cat.

The Tanakas feel like an actual family that’s grown up in close proximity, and I howled at how they all realized that they were actually all Tanakas reincarnated, rather than it just being them with some other family. The siblings act like siblings, with George and William trying desperately to not have Emma somehow blow everything up – especially as she’s a gorgeous little girl in this world, so everyone pays a lot more attention to her. I also loved the subplot with Rose, the king’s favored concubine, who after giving birth to two children is unceremoniously shipped out to the sticks, and has been having a very bad time of it. How she ends up bonding with Emma may annoy me a bit (hint: she’s stacked), but I appreciated how she no longer felt anyone saw her as anything but an extension of her children. As for the monster which leads to the biggest threat in the book, this is another reversal that relies on the reader knowing their light novel lore, and I appreciated the threat – and how it leads to permanent damage, if thankfully less than expected.

The next volume has the family all moving from the countryside into the capital, and I have a suspicion we’re getting a magic academy arc, even if magic is super rare in this world. And yes, I haven’t mentioned the giant cats, and where they come from. Or the giant spider, who would get along well with Mr. Crawly Wawly. Basically, assuming you don’t mind the usual Japanese light novel cliches, this is a huge winner, and I can’t wait for more.