Archive for the Light Novel Category


I’m in Love With the Villainess, Light Novel Volume 1

September 17th, 2020

I’m in Love With the Villainess, Volume 1, written by Inori, illustrated by Hanagata, out from Seven Seas, was an extraordinary read. I mean that in the most positive way. This book was surprising in ways I would never have imagined it to be, in ways that blew me away.

Oohashi Rei, an adult who has always loved games, finds herself waking in the world of Revolution, her favorite otome game. Armed with encyclopedic knowledge of the world of Revolution, and skills given to the PC, Rei, now known as Rae Taylor, sets out to do the one thing she wants most….to romance the villainess, Claire François.

From the beginning, there were little touches that had me intrigued. For instance, the novel lacks Truck-kun. No one dies. Rei simply wakes up in the game as Rae.  Although Rae is a teenager, she has not lost her adult perspective and there are decisions or commentary we get from her which are decidedly mature. About a third of the way through the story, Rae discusses something with us, the reader, and I just sat back and said, “huh.” No child thinks that way. It was about that moment, I realized I was reading something completely different.

In my review of ROLL OVER AND DIE, I said, “The premise makes it completely possible to kill your brain cells reading [the violent scenes] and not feel much. In that, I think the author does the readership a disservice.” and I’ve called My Next Life As A Villainess, “lazy writing.” These are not capricious comments. I believe in world- and character-building being key elements in making an excellent story. I have been a voracious reader since I was a child, I’m usually reading 6-8 things at once. I was a comparative literature major in college. I care about the way writers write as a reader and as a writer. I expect that world-building be done with a thoroughness that provides the story a solid three-dimensional base, even if most of the details don’t apply to this story specifically. Overwhelmingly, light novels do not do this and isekai (or isekai-adjacent) LNs tend to rely on tropes and handwaves to skip the relevant world- and character-building. I’m in Love With the Villainess does the work.

And then you hit a moment when Misha, Rae’s best friend, roommate and foil, turns to Rae and asks, “Are you gay?”…and the characters have a frank discussion about sexuality. Rae analyzes her experiences and feelings and we watch her do so – in so many words – then watch her reach an unusual conclusion, given that this is a webnovel.

But wait, there’s more. This little web novel, this penny-candy confectionery of literary effort, doesn’t stop there. There will be discussions of abuse of authority, and unfair sentencing, of political protests and economic inequality. And, they will make sense in the context of the story. The otome game is called Revolution, after all. ^_^

While all of this world-building is happening, Rae is cheerfully teasing Clare into bullying her, and enjoying every second of it. Never for a second does Rae stop enjoying herself. The more we learn about Rae, the more we come to learn about Oohashi Rei, who seems like a decent person, one we might be able to be friends with.

The only complaint I sincerely have is that there is a scene (I refuse to spoil) that ought to have been illustrated but was not. That is the only negative for this book. Thankfully…there is a manga! Yesterday I mentioned that I’m reading the manga for this series as it runs in Comic Yuri Hime magazine. There are some small differences in functionality, with each medium providing positive and negative qualities. We have not yet reached that specific scene in the manga, but I fervently pray for a few good screencaps. This is where the manga will definitely provide a benefit. On the other side, the novel format allows Rae more internal monologue and she is, IMHO, more relatable as a result.

Absolutely shout-out to Jenn Yamazaki and Nibedita Sen for the translation and adaptation here. Some of the translation lines were in and of themselves, sublime. I’ve never thrilled so much at the use of “There it was.” George Panella’s logo also gets a tip of the hat from me. Everyone at Seven Seas really pulled out the stops here for what is definitely, positively going to be one of my Top Ten Yuri of the Year. No question, this is the series to beat right now.

Ratings:

Art – 7 Adequate, but once again fails completely to illustrate anything significant or interesting
Story – 9 Takes the banal set-up and flies
Characters – 10
Yuri – 7 one-sided in this volume, but…
LGBTQ – Yes!
Service – 2 Implied and some other stuff

Overall – 9

Author Inori thanks their partner in the author’s note. That might have something to do with that discussion of sexuality.

I’m in Love With the Villainess is available digitally on Kindle and Bookwalker Global next week, in print at the end of November.

The novel series, Watashi no Oshi ha Akujyaku Reijou! (私の推しは悪役令嬢。) is available in full in Japanese on webnovel site Syoetsu ni Narou!. Volume 1, Volume 2 and Volume 3 are available in Japanese on JP Kindle. The covers for V2 and V3 are full of spoilery goodness.

Along with Yagate Kimi ni Naru Saeki Sayaka ni Tsuite, Volume 3,  which will make it over here as Bloom Into You: Regarding Saeki Sayaka, Volume 3, in December, Yuri Light Novels got a lot gayer in 2020. ^_^

Many thanks to Seven Seas for the review copy.





My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom! Volume 3

September 14th, 2020

There is no one more surprised than I am that I’m here reviewing My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom!, Volume 3 he Light Novel. Why? Because the Yuri in this series is 100% pure queerbaiting, written more lazily than one can countenance…and yet, it’s pretty enjoyable anyway. So here we are. ^_^

After Volume 2 and after the finale of the anime, Katarina is still in Magic Academy with her friends. Although Nicol has graduated, Sophia, Mary and Maria, Alan and Jeord are all at Katarina’s side to celebrate the school festival. The first half of the book is a description of a pop-up gourmet food and high-end goods town that passes as this absurdly weathly nobles’ school “festival.”

We meet Alan and Jeord’s older brothers…and their wives, which is going to clearly mean something at some point, because everything and everyone in this series is a gun on the wall. Katarina, despite her inability to remember the lines, is roped into playing an evil stepsister in Cinderella, so she draws on her memory of evil Katarina from the game and becomes a star actress. And then, she’s kidnapped.

I call the series “queerbait,” because while Katarina does go on at length about how charming and beautiful Maria is and how, if she had been a man, she’d have already asked her to marry her, and Maria’s machinations in order to stay near Katarina…and of course Mary’s open desire for Katarina…it’s only ever the men who get a kiss. I consider the writing lazy because every chapter’s dialogue, once written, can be used whole for the next, necessitating only rewrites for perspective. The most time-consuming part of the writing would be devising means by which Katarina explains away obvious, normal  behaviors through ridiculously convoluted contrivances.  These qualities might surely be flaws if this series were not obviously brainless fun from the get-go. But it is brainless fun, so one enjoys the obvious queerbaiting and takes to Pixiv to find art that does not make one wish to scream.

Ratings:

Art – 6 Not bad, per se, but not relevant either
Characters – 10
Story – 7
Yuri – 5
Service – 0

Overall – 9

I’m in desperate need of entertainment that requires no thinking right now, so this volume totally hit the mark. 
I purchased this on Bookwalker Global, but it is also available in print and on Kindle from J-Novel Club.

I adore the cover of this volume, because we finally get to see the Villainess Katarina.





ROLL OVER AND DIE: I Will Fight for an Ordinary Life with My Love and Cursed Sword!, Vol. 1

September 11th, 2020

I just finished ROLL OVER AND DIE: I Will Fight for an Ordinary Life with My Love and Cursed Sword!, Vol. 1 written by kiki, illustrated by kinta, out now from Seven Seas. Tl;dr  It was a fast read and overall, a good one. I will certainly read the next volume.

Flum Apricot was chosen young to be legendary warrior, but her “reversal” skill means her stats are always at 0. To make herself more useful, she provides food and backup to the team, but her cheerfulness and friendship with the other members makes wannabee team-leader Jean angry, so he has her snatched, branded and sold as a slave. Flum escapes with the help of her power and a cursed sword. along with the slave girl she recuses, Milkit. Together they set out to become adventurers to pay the bills. They find derision and antagonism at the Adventurer’s Guild, but together they overcome all the very bad odds against their survival and end up thriving.

Reading this brought up a lot of comparisons, as I have, over my years of reading obsessively, read an enormous number of books.  First, the opening premise brought to mind Piers Anthony’s Xanth series, in which protagonist Bink had a similarly extremely powerful and even more extremely annoying magical skill. And, indeed, the beginning seems a little like Xanth, if the focus had been on violent dismemberment and the panty shot obsession was just a little side gig. Because this book is heavy on the grotesque violence.

Which brings me to the second comparison. As you may know, I am fully all-in on the Locked Tomb fandom and obsessive about Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth. So much so that I have actually considered making a Sixth House costume (which is, coincidentally exactly what I wear anyway, with a cloak and few more pens and a caliper in the pockets. It’s even the right color. ^_^ Find your own House here, but I’ve known I was Sixth since the first page. ^_^) In many ways, ROLL OVER AND DIE feels like a 8-bit freeware version of Gideon.

Which is not to say that it is a bad book, even though it might be pushing it to say that it is “Good.” It is heavy on the set-ups of violence against the persons involved who are mostly, but not exclusively, women. Those setups linger just long enough to be triggering if scenes of physical torture, dismemberment, mangling, rape and more general rapaciousness bother you – as they should. The premise makes it completely possible to kill your brain cells reading that and not feel much. In that, I think the author does the readership a disservice. It is one of my two main complaints about this book.

On the good side, the sexist and classist violence and disrespect the women face will not be the main plot, as it was in JK Haru is a Sex Worker in Another World. Equally in the positive column is that the women involved are team-building, in much the same way they do in Sexiled. The characters are relatively likable, and they work well together. The Yuri…well, we’ll get there…

The primary objection I have is that I am simply not okay with “men are vile sexist shitbags to women” as a world-building handwave. Yeah, we get it. Actually, we live it. We don’t need it described to us. 1 out of 5 women have been raped or experienced attempted rape, and 1 in 38 men. That means you absolutely, positively know someone who has been raped. Think of how many people you know. That’s a lot of sexual assault.  I can completely understand that conflict drives growth, and violence against women, and use of people as property are both low-hanging fruit for conflict, (and yes, rape and violence sure can be legit forms of fantasy) but without nuanced writing, this is just torture porn and I am not really here for it. On the positive side, many of the most egregiously vile scenes are cut short, and only the blatantly violent ones are left to play out. Still may not be to your taste, because it is pretty grimdark overall.

Again, on the positive side, not all men in this book are dirtbags. Flum and Apricot receive a lot of kindness from some of the men in the story and, as it goes on, I think there’ll be a balance, but a balance of extremes, on the one hand rapacious dirtbags and the other exceedingly kind and generous men. I hope that the men get to be more fleshed out as, so far at least, the female characters are.

So, let’s talk about the Yuri. Flum and Milkit definitely grow closer, slowly and pretty carefully. The relationship is just beginning to develop as the final scenes play out. It’s played for a very gentle kind of service at the end, but I can’t really complain. Milkit’s backstory precludes anything just happening spontaneously and, thankfully, it’s not handled in a hamfisted manner.

The art for once is pretty good, although we’re told repeatedly that Flum is dressed in sensible clothing and the art never once reflects that, which just pisses me off. Women look good in pants and boots, folks. Stop with the floofy dresses and bloomer-style shorts. At least Milkit’s stupid costume was given a story, even if it’s one of the least believable choices in the books. ^_^;

Ratings:

Art – 7
Story – 7 Grim and grotesque, but not bad
Characters – 8
Service – Mostly of the gross kind, with a bit here and there of dressing and undressing. The Yuri service is absurdly gentle as it has to be to work
Yuri – 4, but no doubt it will climb

Overall – 8

But Erica – you ought to be saying right now – you said that you had two complaints and you only discussed one. What’s the other main complaint?”

I look at you, smiling and say: Well, Milkit is a terrible, awful name, isn’t it? It’s just so bovine and miserable. But that’s not the problem. The main complaint is that Flum Apricot is the most enraging awful protagonist name ever. Flum? FLUM?!? Half my brain was screaming that “It *clearly ought to be Plum, not Flum!” and the other half was screaming “Yo, not better!” in an endless loop.

Horrible, horrible naming. Absolutely ugh-making. Flum Apricot. Enraging. I’m not blaming anyone but it set my brain on fire. ^_^

I genuinely enjoyed kiki’s author’s note and the dithering about the word count. I purchased this digitally on Bookwalker Global and was pretty pleased with the formatting, with loads of white space which made it easier to read.

Here are my pullquote suggestions for this book:

“When life gives fated hero Flum lemons, she picks up a cursed sword and makes *^$!ing lemonade.”

“Legendary warrior Flum and ex-slave Milkit are shining lights in the grimdark.”

“Roll Over and Die is a Funhouse Dark Ride of a novel; an energetic mashup of fantasy, horror and Yuri.”





Bloom Into You Regarding Saeki Sayaka, Volume 2

August 17th, 2020

Saeki Sayaka would probably not, if you asked, consider herself nostalgic. Nor would she likely think of herself as capricious, I don’t think she’d go far as to say that she was any more logical than anyone else. I am confident, however, that she would agree that she is a thoughtful young lady, who considers her choices carefully…and considers the consequences of those choices very deeply.

In Bloom Into You Regarding Saeki Sayaka, Volume 2, we meet Sayaka after she has experienced love and loss in middle school and after she has fallen in love once again in high school. It’s a love that isn’t going to be realized, we know, but she’s in the middle of it. While she might have an inkling that she’s put herself in an untenable position, she’s allowing herself a kernel of something like hope, a promise to herself that if she should want to reach out and bridge the distance between her and Touko, she could…she just doesn’t want to.  It’s a pleasant little story, that becomes a lie in the beginning pages of the book and Sayaka knows it.

We can relax into this book because, of course, we already know happened, but we really should take a moment to appreciate how much work the writer, Hitoma Iruma, put into it. They could not relax at all, as the readers already know what happened. ^_^

There are number of nice touches in this volume too. Classmates Manaka and Midori are a lot of fun. I read an early passage in which Manaka said that joining a club would be useful, because “…if you exercise enough, you’ll be ready if something happens and you need to make a quick getaway.” I hope we all had a laugh remembering the friend in high school who said stuff like that. (Honestly, in my crowd, any one of us was likely to be “that guy.” ^_^)

Physically, this book was lovely, with extra flourishes by interior designer Clay Gardener – the original Japanese volume had undecorated pages. I thought this was a very nice touch. All the other technicals were likewise excellent. Translation and adaptation were spot on for the serious Sayaka we see in the anime.

I enjoyed this volume immensely – again. As I said in my review of the Japanese edition, “I am pleasantly surprised to have fully enjoyed a novel by Iruma Hitoma, in which the tone and feel of the character as we know her is captured well.” I look forward so much to the third volume in December, in which we see Sayaka exist apart from Touko, as she becomes the Sayaka she will bloom into.

Ratings:

Art – 10 Art by the series creator
Story – 8 A stronger sense of Sayaka’s feelings for and about Touko
Character – 10
Service – 1 Not really this time
Yuri – 7 This book is chock-full of Sayaka’s thoughts about being attracted to Touko for all the reasons.

Overall – 9

My impression of the third volume in Japanese, was that I grinned throughout. I hope you do too!

Thank you to Seven Seas for the review copy. As a result of their generosity, I have an extra copy to give away!  Enter by putting a funny story about a friend in high school saying something goofy and you’ll be entered. Use an email you check regularly. I’ll pick a winner by Sunday, August 23. (The winner has been contacted!) Here’s my story:

In high school I was sitting with some friends in the cafeteria and one of them had decided that she was head over heel in love with some senior boy. She asked us all to say what liked best about him and my future sister-in-law said, “His absence.” I absolutely lost it and haven’t stopped laughing about it since. ^_^





Isekai ni Saku ha Yuri no Hana ~Konnyaku Hakisareta node Honmei no Akuyaku Reijou to Onna Futari (異世界に咲くは百合の花～婚約破棄されたので本命の悪役令嬢と女ふたりで楽しく暮らします！～)

July 24th, 2020

Kareuda Ameco’s Isekai ni Saku ha Yuri no Hana ~Konnyaku Hakisareta node Honmei no Akuyaku Oeijou to Onna Futari de Tanoshiku Kurashimasu!~ (異世界に咲くは百合の花～婚約破棄されたので本命の悪役令嬢と女ふたりで楽しく暮らします！～) is the first Yuri webnovel I am reviewing as a web novel.

This is a multiple breakthrough on Okazu….this is the first overwhelmingly absurdly overlong Light Novel title for this blog. ^_^ It literally takes up two lines on the editor. It also marks the first time I’ve read the web novel not in final published for before buying the book.  GL Bunko has released it in digital for Japanese Kindle and J-Novel Club has licensed it for release in English as A Lily Blooms In Another World, (with a preview up now on the J-Novel Club website) but I have had this sucker bookmarked for *months* on Syosetuka ni Narou!, the webnovel website quite a lot of recently licensed work has come from.

Miyako Florence is affianced to the powerful Klaus Reinhardt, but she has no interest in him. Having been born into this world from our own, she is familiar with the players of this new world and Miyako knows exactly what she wants…who she wants…and she wants the villainess Fuuka Hamilton, of the Hamilton family. Taking Fuuka’s hand, Miyako runs away with Fuuka, until a pandemic brings them in direct conflict with both their families.

This was a story written, as I like to joke, to be weeb-nip, as if Kaeruda-sensei wrote it with a big ole’ grin on her face. It’s charmingly silly. And, buried under all its goofiness is something breathtaking and magnificent.

In Sexiled, Kaeruda-sensei created a world where women were systemically undervalued. Isekai ni Saku ha Yuri no Hana exists in that same world, but among the noble classes where daughters are used as marriageable chattel and nothing else. Fuuka is repeatedly called a villainess, but her only true crime appears to have been being born to a villainous family. Fuuka is herself an intelligent, accomplished, talented high-born beauty, whose family treats her horribly.

Fuuka and Miyako met and have their lives changed by another lesbian couple, but other than the fact that they are commoners, I will tell you absolutely nothing about them, so you get to enjoy the reveal.

The webnovel has no illustrations, but the published edition does. I am not at all fond of the cover art, so I expect to not at all enjoy the art when I read it, but I don’t mind. It will be a fast and endearing read in every other way.  This series is also set up nicely to be illustrated or animated in a way that Sexiled was not, complete with magical sea beast who takes the form of a cat. ^_^

In the way that Sexiled creates a female revenge scenario in which the man is merely made to be seen as foolish as he actually is, and the women’s skills and power appreciated for what they actually are…in Isekai ni Saku ha Yuri no Hana the woman is finally seen and appreciated for what she can and does do. In a lot of ways, I found this story, as gobsmackingly silly as it is, to be more touching and personal.

Ratings:

Art – N/A for the webnovel
Story – A delicious confection of a story
Characters – Competent adult women being appreciated and loved for their selves, yes please!
Service – Competent adult women being appreciated and loved for their selves, yes, please!
Yuri – 9

Overall – 9

This was a delightful story.

I really wish, however, that GL Bunko illustrated beautiful accomplished adult noble women not like 8 year olds. It is very tiresome, especially given the entire context of the story hinging on the intrinsic value of women.