The Blessing of Liefe: Leave This Magical Letdown Alone!, Vol. 2

December 7, 2024 by Leave a Comment

By Kureha and Yoko Matsurika. Released in Japan as “Liefe no Shukufuku: Muzokusei Mahō Shika Tsukaenai Ochikobore toshite Hottoite Kudasai” by Arian Rose. Released in North America by J-Novel Heart. Translated by Alex Castor.

In my review of the first volume I marveled at the fact that our heroine had, helping her out and in her corner, about 90% of the important and powerful people in the kingdom, which sort of made this story about an abused child even more Cinderella than those stories usually are. This volume tries to show us that there’s a reason that she needs all that support and protection. The volume begins with a flashback to the tournament she did in middle school, where we hear she simply never bothered to show up for the semifinals. Now here we see why – she’s been threatened, and it does not take a genius to figure out who has enough emotional hold over her to get her to change the entire way she’s been living to date. As such, the resolution of the confession she got in the first book is obvious. It’s hard to agree to a romantic love with the prince when you have PTSD.

So yes, as I hinted above, Yui ends up rejecting Prince Filiel’s proposal. Everyone then heads off to the training camp for strong fighters, which also has Yui and her passel of first-year prodigies along for the ride, much to the disgust of some of the other students. This disgust is not helped by Yui’s attitude throughout the entire training camp. She skips out on all the training, doesn’t care about anything but sweets, and when forced to fight, puts up a defensive wall and starts to read a book. About sweets. She’s always been fairly blase and nonchalant about things, but it’s getting a bit ridiculous. Maybe Filiel’s proposal had a lot more impact than he thought. Can everyone figure out how to get Yui to come out of her shell and try to be the prodigy she is? And can they do this with anything other than snack bribes?

We know Yui’s backstory with her father, so can sympathize with her. Well, *I* can sympathize with her. I have a feeling a lot of readers are going to bounce off Yui hard, and I get it. What’s more, to those who DON’T know Yui’s abusive backstory, she comes across as an arrogant, uncaring, overprivileged creep, due to, well, everyone being in her corner. The middle of the book, where Yui is forced to fight battles, is a tale of two halves. In the first half, you grind your teeth at how stubborn and irritating Yui is being. Then, in the back half, we see her going up against one of the strongest men in the kingdom, and she shows off WHY she’s hiding everything and trying to avoid showing her true magic at all. Yui knows very well what her father wants. He wants to use her, marry her off, and otherwise treat her like a thing. And it terrifies her, because her father is a noble, and as we’ve seen in this series, nobles kinda suck.

Fortunately, by the end of the book, she does accept Filiel’s feelings, so in future books we can… what’s that? No volumes in two years>? Webnovel also looks abandoned? Well then. In any case, I enjoyed this.

Filed Under: blessing of liefe, reviews

The Former Assassin Who Got Reincarnated As a Noble Girl, Vol. 2

December 4, 2024 by Leave a Comment

By Satsuki Otonashi and MiRea. Released in Japan as “Moto Ansatsusha, Tenseishite Kizoku no Reijou ni Narimashita” by PASH! Books. Released in North America by Cross Infinite World. Translated by Jordan Taylor.

I admit I was surprised and a little put off by the cover of this volume, which, like the cover of the first, is salacious and mostly exists to draw in the hapless reader by promising sex that isn’t actually there. That said, the cover is actually quite clever, as your eyes may be drawn to her chest but we are also meant to notice her gun, and the huge and deadly hairpin she also has. Selena talks about “honey traps” in this series, and the volume in fact opens with the rather hapless and tragic crown princess being driven half mad and out of the palace by her asshole husband bringing home a “honey trap” lover and their two children and saying “this is who will be next in line now”. Thus, Selena on the cover of this volume is meant to draw in a reader hoping for a bit of sex. There’s none of that here. But there sure is lots of death and violence. This series is dark as pitch.

We open with, as I noted above, the tragic downfall of Shahrnaz, a noble girl who marries the crown prince, has a child, and thinks that things are fine. They’re not. Many years later, Selena is told that their school is getting three exchange students: Shaghad, the son of the prince and Shahrnaz, and Ismail and Aisha, the two children of the prince and his lover, a viscount’s daughter. They’re behaving like arrogant fools, but they also have a mission: Aisha is here to seduce Prince Evan, and Ismael is here to get rid of Shaghad, who is first in the actual succession. It doesn’t help that Shaghad, who has a big helping of “my mother abandoned me and I feel depressed”, is letting them do whatever they want. Clearly another noble is not what’s needed here. This needs an assassin’s touch.

For the most part, this book has a plotline that is pretty obvious… at least until the end, which has a terrific twist that I won’t spoil. Selena spends much of the volume rather annoyed that she has to be dealing with this at all, though once she manages to get Shaghad to actually take steps to stand up for himself, and also trains him to fend off assassins, she feels better. The ongoing questions seems to be not “who will she choose, royalty or her devoted bodyguard?”, as honestly I don’t trust her not to kill both of them if she feels a need to. The writer says that they gave Selena a “dumb” friend, partly so she actually had a friend who wasn’t a love interest, but also to point out that Selena can be as grimdark as she likes, and kill as many assassins as she wants, but in the end she does care about people, and there’s no getting around that. The assassin is also a noble girl, and that’s not something Selene can accept right now.

This second volume was not part of the webnovel but requested by the publisher, and there’s no third book out in Japan, so this may end up being it. It’s an odd duck, this, and I’m not sure it could have reasonably given us a happy ending, but I liked it.

Filed Under: former assassin who got reincarnated as a noble girl, reviews

Soup Forest: The Story of the Woman Who Speaks with Animals and the Former Mercenary, Vol. 2

December 3, 2024 by Leave a Comment

By Syuu and Muni. Released in Japan as “Soup no Mori: Doubutsu to Kaiwa Suru Olivia to Moto Youhei Arthur no Monogatari” by PASH! Books. Released in North America by Cross Infinite World. Translated by Jordan Taylor.

It’s always annoying when I read an afterword and the author essentially says everything I’m going to say. So yes, the first book in this series was about taking a broken young woman and helping her to open up to one man, leading to their marriage. This second book has as its goal getting her to interact with a much larger world, and also realizing that, while her powers may make some people scared and/or dismissive or her, this isn’t always the case, and that her powers can do good things. To be honest, she ends up saving a lot of lives here. Clearly she probably SHOULD be a royal apothecary, as she has the skills, and also can talk to the animals like Doctor Doolittle. There is just one slight problem – Olivia doesn’t want to do this. She wants to live in the forest with her husband, sister (more on that later) and many, many animals and hand out soup. Sorry, kid, you’re a light novel protagonist.

This book alternates between slice-of-life stories of Olivia puttering around her restaurant with Arthur, doing things like making health potions or healing a wounded rabbit, and the larger overall plot of Olivia’s world becoming much larger. This is mostly due to the arrival of Lara, a runaway teenager who was the daughter of a noble father and his maid, and now that the father and her mother have died the stepmother has made her life miserable. She ends up becoming the younger sister that Olivia never had, and is basically part of the story to add sometime bright and upbeat to a series that is still mostly about two sweet yet default morose individuals. She’s also studying to be an apothecary, something that Olivia is already qualified for… and she even gets a letter saying she is the equivalent of a royal apothecary. Which is good, as this is a dangerous world.

As I said above, if Book 1 is “Olivia gradually learns to care about things other than the animal world”, this one definitely shows the interactions between the animal world and the human world, and Olivia and her powers are a huge part of that. Olivia ends up getting more than one “What’s that, girl? Timmy? Trapped? Down in Dead Rock Canyon?” moment here, though the animals can literally speak to her, so it just makes things easier. Which is good, as this book is filled with deadly plagues, near-fatal road accidents, and driven insane with grief drunkards, and Olivia comes to the rescue each time. The last one is particularly hilarious, as we meet a steward who clearly despises Olivia, and think to ourselves, “Oh man, I hope he’s secretly evil”. And good news! This was the one plot that didn’t quite work for me, as it felt the most manufactured and had the most bullshit use of Olivia’s powers. But I’m not really going to criticize such a relaxed series like this for going too OP.

The webnovel of this series indicates there’s a third book, but it’s not out from the publisher yet. I wonder if it will continue trying to drag Olivia into larger and larger political spheres and away from her insular life. I can see an argument either way.

Filed Under: reviews, soup forest
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