By Rika and HIROKAZU. Released in Japan as “Isekai ni Kita kedo, Seikatsu Mahou shika Tsukaemasen” by Mag Garden Novels. Released in North America by J-Novel Club. Translated by sachi salehi.

I try to give authors the benefit of the doubt, but sometimes it’s a little easier to tell that their hot new series is not “I have a brilliant idea for a story that just won’t go away” and more “what’s hot and trending that I can whip up fast?”. The first volume of this already had a noble girl at a magical academy where she’s more OP than most everyone around her, but was mostly content to stay in that lane. While this second volume also hangs around in that genre, there are signs that it wants to branch out. The moment that Patience asked who those people were and was told they were from The Adventurer’s Guild, I groaned a bit. Then there was monster hunting. Did you know monster meat is delicious, milady? Would you like me to pass it to you? That said, while that may impact future volumes, here we’re just content to do genre-related things like inventing sea salt and pound cake.

Patience is spending a large chunk of her summer with Princess Margaret and the royal family, mostly as the Queen has figured out that Patience is the only one who can actually motivate Princess Margaret. She gets to see the sea, and as I noted before, she and Prince Richard come up with ways to get sea salt, which will stop the kingdom being so dependent on rock salt. After this it’s back to school, and coming up with more songs that she has “written” for everyone to play, as well as fending off Albert, who is not into 11-year-olds but wants her creativity around him his whole life. She’s also trying to figure out what happened with her father losing his job, and near the end of the book, we finally get that answer, and it proves to be the best part of the book as well.

I find it amusing that while the series frames Patience’s dad as being the one noble willing to stand up for the common man, even to the point of sacrificing nearly everything, in reality he’s kind of weedy and pathetic, and you get the sense that a lot of his arguments with his sisters are less “they are horrible and overbearing” and more about him being non-confrontational to a ridiculous degree. Now, they are confrontational and overbearing, but mostly for Patience that proves to be a good thing. She also proves to be a fantastic teacher, as when blackmailed into teaching her cousin, who has many issues with studying, she’s able to find ways to get him interested, identify the problem, and set him up for future success. No wonder everyone wants her, Right now she’s still a lady’s maid, but in future…

She’s off to “college” in the next volume, and I expect, given the foreshadowing, this series to branch out a bit. Hopefully no dungeon diving. This remains “pretty good”.