Kuma Kuma Kuma Bear, Vol. 11

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By Kumanano and 029. Released in Japan by PASH! Books. Released in North America by Seven Seas. Translated by Jan Cash & Vincent Castaneda. Adapted by M.B. Hare.

Another light and fluffy volume, though we are given a hint of the next major villain as Ellelaura has a noble who hates her… and hates Yuna, albeit for different but related reasons. He’s clearly going to be an antagonist at some point, but is merely shown off here in order to provide SOME drama in a book that otherwise meanders even more than a volume of Kuma Bear normally does. As for Yuna, she’s still doing her best to be blase about everything, but it’s getting harder, especially when it gets shoved in her face by multiple people that all the things she’s done, such as the tunnel, or the various new dishes, or taking out an entire noble family, cause lots of problems for the King and other nobles afterward… problems that Yuna herself has remained blissfully unaware of. That said, despite her feeling a bit of guilt over this, I don’t expect ‘The Bear Becomes a Civil Servant” to be a subplot here. Yuna is who she is.

The main plot of this volume is that the Academy is having a school festival, and Shia would like Yuna to come. This ends up roping in Noa, Fina, and Shuri as well, with Yuna acting as their bodyguard. Which, of course, means she has to walk around in the bear suit, which embarrasses her more than usual this time around, as the festival feels very much like the ones she… did not go to back in Japan. Honestly, most of the second half of the book is Yuna getting it ground into her face how much she is NOT a normal teenage girl. Yuna helps Shia’s group by suggesting they make cotton candy, an unknown quantity in this land. She also meets Flora’s older sister Princess Teilia, who has been someone upset at the rest of the Royal Family for hearing all about this amazing bear girl but never meeting her.

If that doesn’t sound like a plot, that’s because it isn’t. I’m happy everyone gets to have fun, but the main drawback to this volume is that there just isn’t any conflict at all. Previous volumes had a contract between Yuna’s fluffy antics and some surprisingly dark storylines, but that does make this one seem a bit shallow. I also urge Fina’s parents and Yuna to do something about that girl’s self-esteem, as there’s “I am modest” and then there’s this. Even as Fina shows off how she’s the best monster butcher in the land (and yes, how to butcher a monster is a booth at the festival), she still acts as if she’s going to be thrown in the dungeon the moment she makes a wrong move. She needs some confidence.

We’ve only finished the first day of the festival, so I assume it will continue into the 12th volume. But before, that… yes, it’s 11.5, featuring short stories posted to the web, original short stories, designs form the artist, and more. So I guess we’ll leave Yuna is festival mode for a few more months.

Your Forma: Electronic Investigator Echika and Her Amicus Ex Machina

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By Mareho Kikuishi and Tsubata Nozaki. Released in Japan by Dengeki Bunko. Released in North America by Yen On. Translated by Roman Lempert.

Possibly the most difficult type of book for me to review falls under the category of “excellent book that is nevertheless not for me”. I can recognize the worth in this title, and think a lot of people should check it out, especially if you like the darker side of light novels such as Eighty-Six (whose author recommends Your Forma). That said, this is going to be my only volume of this series, which very nicely wraps up as if it was a single book. (It was a contest winner, and those usually do.) First, its genre, however sci-fi its coating may be, is police procedural, which I usually do not vibe with. Secondly, one of the two leads annoyed me throughout the book. Now, that’s deliberate on the part of the author, and there’s a very good, realistic reason behind it. Nevertheless: annoyed. That said… damn, this was compelling, and I loved Echika, the brilliant but broken cop who keeps losing partners as they injure themselves trying to keep up with her amazing brain.

In an alternate version of our present everyone has Your Forma, which is basically a sort of VR overlay in their head. Unfortunately, that also leads to things like viruses that make the user see horrible blizzards and puts them into the hospital. Echika and her partner are diving into the minds of the infected to try to trace where it came from. Sadly, her partner passes out, as I noted above, when Echika is simply too fast for him. Since she has done this for several partners in a row, her chief is a bit tired of it, and partners her with an Amicus – which is to say an artificial human. The question of just how self-aware they are is very much up in the air, and Echika for one despises them, for reasons that seem to have something to do with her past. Can Harold prove his worth to her and turn this into a fun Caves of Steel-esque book? Or is there something more sinister going on?

First off, as I noted above, I know there are some people who will want to know this, so: Your Forma is indeed a cop book, and there are cops here who do questionable things, including our two leads. So YMMV there. Echika’s past is something that comes out little by little as the book goes on, and her cold, seemingly emotionless exterior is chipped away by Harold’s charming, sensitive… and manipulative questions, as he needs to break through her facade in order to get what he wants. Honestly, as a long-time reader of books with realistically human robots, the question of whether Harold was a “real” person was one I took as read, and I think as a reader we’re supposed to. This also means I’m allowed to think that he’s an asshole a lot of the time frequently to provoke Echika into a reaction. The fact that he’s very charming while doing this does not really change it.

I do recommend this book to fans of crime dramas or sci-fi. The world it carves out is excellent, the action and set pieces are also excellent, Echika is terrific.

7th Time Loop: The Villainess Enjoys a Carefree Life Married to Her Worst Enemy!, Vol. 1

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By Touko Amekawa and Wan*Hachipisu. Released in Japan as “Loop 7-kaime no Akuyaku Reijou wa, Moto Tekikoku de Jiyuukimama na Hanayome (Hitojichi) Seikatsu wo Mankitsusuru” by Overlap Novels f. Released in North America by Seven Seas. Translated by Julie Goniwich. Adapted by Aysha U. Farah.

The word ‘villainess’ has always had a loose definition to begin with, coming from a theoretical character in an otome game that never really existed, and usually being some variation on “mean girl”. Even that doesn’t really apply anymore. The villainess, for the most part, now seems to be any young woman who gets publicly shamed and has her engagement broken by a prince. We meet Rishe here, and there’s certainly no sign that she’s done anything wrong, but the script nevertheless plays out as we know it. Of course, as the title of the series implies, this is not her first rodeo. This has now happened to her SEVEN times. Perhaps she’s been reading a lot of villainess novels as well, and they’ve all blended together so much she keeps coming back to them. Amusingly, the “why” of the loop is irrelevant – it’s there to make her more awesome.

As noted above, Rishe Irmgard Weitzner is publicly shamed by her fiancee, who calls off their engagement to that he can marry Mary, a poor girl new to nobility. Having now done this SEVEN times, and knowing her parents will shortly be disowning her and barring her from the house, she tries to bolt back home to grab her things before this occurs. Unfortunately, she runs into Arnold, the Crown Prince of a different country, who had also been attending. He’s fascinated with her, mostly as she doesn’t seem to have any awe of him at all. Indeed, she wants nothing to do with him – every single time loop she’s lived to the age of twenty and died, and it’s either indirectly or directly because of him. This time, though, something new happens – he wants to marry her. Maybe, if she goes along with this, she can find out what makes him want to wage the war that keeps killing her…

I had a ball reading this. Rishe is definitely on the “smart” end of villainess protagonists, mostly as she’s lived 5 years of a different life seven times. First she was a merchant, then an apothecary, etc. She even disguised herself as a man to become a knight… but Arnold ran her through. In this particular loopy, Arnold seems, around her, to be the standard shoujo manga love interest. Unfortunately, he also seems to have a destructive streak about him, and Rishe can’t quite figure out what’s behind it. The antagonist of this book is his younger brother Theodore, who seems to be the stereotypical “evil sibling” but also turns out to have greater depths than anticipated. I also liked how many of the characters in the show who are seen to be “betraying” someone are doing so because they’re poor and desperate – this book is not afraid to show us the disparity in class.

At the end of this volume, Theodore may have resolved some of his issues but Rishe is still a long way from learning the truth about Arnold. I definitely look forward to more volumes of her finding out. Recommended for villainess fans, romance fans, and mystery fans.