The Apothecary Diaries, Vol. 8

Leave a reply

By Natsu Hyuuga and Touko Shino. Released in Japan as “Kusuriya no Hitorigoto” by Hero Bunko. Released in North America by J-Novel Club. Translated by Kevin Steinbach.

For most of the volume this almost seems like a short story book, with Maomao running around dealing with various things one by one. It’s only when we get near the end that we realize that all the stories we’d seen earlier are all tying together, and all of them are there to show off Maomao and how good she is at what she does, whether that be medicine, or crime-solving, or even just being blunt as hell. She may be annoyed about all of this, but she still does it, mostly for the promise of good food, good medicine, or the chance to avoid people that she’d rather never deal with again, i,e, Lakan, who is slightly less annoying than he normally is in these books, but that’s only because he’s performing the equivalent of a wake. And this all culminates in a final scene that I really don’t want to spoil, which is basically “who gets Maomao?”, and the consequences are larger than you think.

Maomao spends a lot of the book with Yao and En’en by her side, wondering offhandedly if this might be that thing humans call… friendship? She’s just gotten a pile of Go books written by Lakan, presumably as a present, and she’s desperate to sell them, especially when she hears how much people might actually be willing to pay for a book written by a legendary player. But first she has to solve the question of why the consistency of the makeup at a store has changed, the question of which of three identical triplets raped an underage girl, and the question of who stole – or sabotaged – the Empress’ hair stick, perhaps as a threat. All of this culminates in a massive Go tournament, with the rumor being that if anyone can defeat Lakan, he will grant them one wish. The rumor is fake, but that doesn’t stop someone from wondering if this is a way to solve his problems…

After featuring heavily in the first few books, we haven’t seen much of Gyokuyou recently, and this book tries to make up for it. She’s not having a great time right now. Her servants keep leaving (as tends to happen, they mostly leave to get married), and new ones are not coming her way because of her manipulative brother. Fortunately, she has a set of identical triplets (no relation, though they also are caught up in one of the crimes Maomao has to solve) to help her, but her oldest attendant is now over 30 and still not married, which is worrying. She *really* misses Maomao, who is a masterclass at cutting to the heart of everything. Unfortunately, she’s reckoned without the fact that Jinshi is ALSO really missing Maomao, and he’s far more obsessed with her than Gyokuyou is. I will not spoil the final scene, but it’s dynamite, with Maomao for once not being able to do anything as the three most powerful people in the country fight over her.

It does leave the question of where we go from here. The blurb for the 9th novel is suitably vague, so we shall see. Till then, please enjoy another book of this very prickly young woman who absolutely everyone adores.

Villainess Level 99: I May Be the Hidden Boss but I’m Not the Demon Lord, Vol. 1

Leave a reply

By Satori Tanabata and Tea. Released in Japan as “Akuyaku Reijō Level 99: Watashi wa Ura Boss Desu ga Maō dewa Arimasen” by Kadokawa Books. Released in North America by J-Novel Club. Translated by sachi salehi.

One of the frequent complaints about fantasy light novels that I’ve seen is that everything tends to be dependent on stats and levels, even when the novel in question is not depicting a world based on a game or people trapped inside a game. Because of Japanese RPGs being the default fantasy for everyone rather than, say, Lord of the Rings or Narnia, everything is about level grinding and raising your stats to the point where you can do things. It’s fine if you’re the reincarnated from Japan person – like our heroine in this book. But to the rest of the cast, this is just their world, and it just… has levels, for some reason that no one quite knows. Even the king thinks it’s baffling. Unfortunately, that’s also the plot of this series, as our heroine is all powerful and ALSO has the stereotypical hair color that makes her clearly EVIL. Fortunately, she’s not evil. Well, mostly. She wavers a bit.

Yumiella Dolkness remembers fairly quickly her past life from Japan (which we get no details about except that she was killed by a car) and knows she’s in a game she played – as the villainess, who also turns out, once you’ve beaten the game, to be a hidden super-strong final boss. Yumiella wants nothing to do with this, at first… but then realizes that if she wants to actually survive, she’d better be strong enough to stand up to the heroine and her love interests. Plus, she loves grinding levels. And, helpfully, her parents have essentially abandoned her in the countryside with only a servant or two, so it’s easy to go out and find monsters and dungeons. Now she’s arrived at the Academy, ordered to do so by her parents (who she’s still never met), and just wants to quietly get through school… despite being 99 times more powerful than most of the student body.

The strength of this book is Yumiella, though she’s also one of the weaknesses, as her personality can vary highly depending on what the writer wants to do. At the start, she’s relatively stoic and blase about everything. As the book goes on, though, she starts to get a lot more “eccentric” in a Katarina Claes sort of way, especially when she ends up raising a dragon as her pet, not understanding why anyone wouldn’t think it was anything but adorable. Then at the end, when things have to turn serious, she’s mostly back to the first, with an added helping of “why aren’t you trying to destroy the country?” from the demon lord. He has a point, given how the very shallowly written heroine treats her. The answer might be Patrick, Yumiella’s love interest, and the only one who really treats her as a person – though he has to work at it. Frankly, given when we meet Yumiella she really DOES think about blowing up the school once or twice, it’s not hard to see where the “hidden boss” thing came from.

Still, overall this was more good than bad, and everything wrapped up nicely in one book. Except, of course, there’s five books and counting, plus an anime on the way. Guess we’ll see you back here in a couple months.

Spy Classroom: Fool Erna Once

Leave a reply

By Takemachi and Tomari. Released in Japan as “Spy Kyoushitsu” by Fujimi Fantasia Bunko. Released in North America by Yen On. Translated by Nathaniel Thrasher.

It should go without saying, but the series Spy Classroom involves spies. And spies can sometimes be not nice people. Downright unpleasant, in fact. We’ve seen that in previous books, with villains working for other countries ranging from weak to comically evil. But for the most part, we know our girls. Those wacky, lovable scamps who are all dropouts but come together in the end with the power of friendship. Surely they’re all different! Well, OK, not Annette. We already know fro previous books that Annette is one of the only girls in Lamplight who can, when push comes to shove, do something cruel. But she may not be alone, as we learn in this book that focuses, for once, on the character the anime tried desperately to adapt and failed miserably. The character that even the publisher tried to avoid drawing for the longest time. A girl plagued by misfortune. Which even extends to this review, because sorry, Erna, Sara is my favorite character in this book.

After the triumph of the fourth book, and becoming an official team, things are not going very well for Lamplight. They’ve been screwing up mission after mission, and believe it or not, it’s not JUST Lily. Things take a turn for the worse, though, when they meet two members of another spy organization working for their country, Avian. If Lamplight is composed of dropouts and washouts, Avian is composed of only the top graduates of spy schools. And recently, their handler was killed, meaning they don’t have a leader. After discerning that Lamplight are pathetic and awful, Avian decide that Klaus should be their leader instead, and Lamplight can all go back to spy school where they truly belong. Of course, the girls are not going to take this lying down, and it ends up becoming a competition to see who the best spy team really is!

If you thought that my description of Lamplight in the last paragraph was a bit mean, you ain’t heard nothing yet. Avian may be just as eccentric as Lamplight, but they’re far, far more skilled, and they have a heaping helping of arrogance to go with it. They’ve also had actual completion of spy school, which means they have an extra technique the Lamplight girls do not, and much of this book amounts to our heroines “trying to reach their second form”. Sara comes close, and actually manages to kick ass and take names (yes, Sara, the animal girl), but of course Erna is the star of the book, for spoilery reasons, and it’s her own development that provides the big climax. It also allows Klaus to have a paternal talk with her, which I appreciate, as Klaus as a hottie everyone wants to bone is not my favorite thing. (That also comes up here, alas.)

All this plus one of THOSE epilogues, the ones that really like to kick you in the teeth and then make you wait for months or so for the next book. This book, though, was good, and arrives just in time for the second half of the anime, which… has nowhere to go but up.