By Mugi Mameta and Nagisa Hanazome. Released in Japan as “Aisanai to Iwaremashite mo – Moto Maou no Hakushaku Reijou wa Kimajime Gunjin ni Ezuke wo Sarete Shiawase ni naru” by M Novels f. Released in North America by Cross Infinite World. Translated by JC.

There are times throughout this second book (and indeed the first one as well) when you can kind of feel everything about to go off the rails. Abigail is a lot, and not only does the cast have trouble trying to control her, so does the author. Perhaps we did not need quite so many scenes of her yelling ‘coitus’, especially as the writing has not quite mastered the difference between “Abigail sounds like someone who has grown up isolated and also is more monster than human a lot of the time’ and ‘Abigail sounds and acts like a 6-year-old”. Where the book does succeed, though, is the divide between genres. The rest of the cast are in a tense political thriller, and also investigating a corrupt domain that abused our main character horribly. Oh, and killer monsters are everywhere. Abigail, however, is in a cooking manga.

The first half of this book is all smiles, as Gerald and Abigail travel to the sea for fish and souvenirs, try to decide if a whole sheep or a whole cow is a better gift for someone, and finally have their first time, which is offscreen but which Abigail seems to like a whole lot, given how much she uses it as a go-to “calm my husband down” thing later. In the second half, though, they’re both forced to go visit the royal family, and deal with the fourth prince, who is in charge of the old lands that Abigail grew up in. Unfortunately, the officials sent there to take care of things have all disappeared/been murdered, so he really needs Abigail (and Gerald) to head over there to help him figure out why. What they find there is that Abigail’s blase description of her abusive life proves to be more horrifying than what they thought.

As with so many other series that are basically “everything was terrible till the start of the first book, everything is wonderful from that point on”, the best parts tend to be the jagged edges that stick out on occasion. Everyone seems to be trying to kill Abigail, be it hired bandits (who she spots running alongside their carriage) or the citizens of her former land (who try to poison her), and things get to the point where an angry dragon decides to kill every human in the area because they’re just that terrible. The best part of the book, as it’s the most horrifying, is when Abigail decides the solution is to let the dragon kill her and be reborn as a human again and get married 15 years down the road. It has to be explained to her why everyone hates this. Then again, Gerald is no better, as he doesn’t seem to understand why Abigail is upset he ran off to fight and left her behind, to the point where she had to climb to the op of a high tree to fix everything.

This is not in the top tier of Cinderella style genre books, but it’s solid. I’ll read another.

By Mugi Mameta and Nagisa Hanazome. Released in Japan as “Aisanai to Iwaremashite mo – Moto Maou no Hakushaku Reijou wa Kimajime Gunjin ni Ezuke wo Sarete Shiawase ni naru” by M Novels f. Released in North America by Cross Infinite World. Translated by JC.

I spent most of this book trying to figure out its heroine, which puts me in the same company as everyone else in this book. I honestly think the artwork does it a bit of disservice. Don’t get me wrong, the artist is fine. But the text has Abigail, the title character, sounding most of the time like a hyperactive six-year-old child, and you imagine her in your head as being filled with massive smiles and big eyes. And then you get the occasional line when we switch to the POV of other people, which tells you that, in fact, Abigail rarely changes her expression from default neutral. Abigail sounds, and honestly is written as 75% of the time, like an adorable moppet. But she is a reincarnated monster, and she spent her first 16 years being starved and abused by her terrible family. The dissonance in this book, especially at the start, is almost comical.

We open with Gerald, the son of a marquis who is entering a political marriage, informing his wife Abigail that he will never love her. She innocently asks if this means she won’t get any food. As he and his servants listen to her talk about her life before arriving there with a creeping horror, any thought of treating her coldly flies out the window. Her old family made her do the laundry (which they threw in the mud), handle running the duchy (she can forge signatures!), and starving her to death by giving her next to no food. She can barely eat four mouthfuls before getting sick. That said, she has a bigger secret. In her past life, she was the Monster King, and she still has access to those powers (and just remembered her past life at her arrival). Which means she can predict disasters, use magic without incantation, and generally is a Top Secret in every single way you can imagine.

The thing that separates this from, say, Little Orphan Annie, or Oliver Twist, is that Abigail is sixteen years old, and is theoretically supposed to be his wife. This can be uncomfortable at times, particularly when Abigail is sounding like a hyperactive child. Fortunately, both the author and the male lead seem conscious of this. As Abigail manages to grow healthier and eat a normal amount, she begins to actually grow into her age physically, but mentally… it’s not that she’s mentally a child, as she can clearly do the work of an earl with minimal issues. No, it’s that her way of thinking at times is literally inhuman. It goes with her blank face. Her abusive life never registered for her except that it meant she didn’t get much food. Her new life is wonderful… because it means she gets more food. She simply is not going to understand the idea of marriage beyond “yum!” at this point. Future volumes will need to keep up the balance while she continues to grow into her new self.

There’s at least four more volumes, which makes this a huge success for the cancel-happy M Novels. Despite occasionally feeling that Abigail was manipulating me with her cuteness, I definitely want to read more. For fans of “Cinderella stories” who don’t mind a heroine whose head is harder to get into.