By Usagi Hoshimi and Qi234. Released in Japan as “Konyakusha-sama ni wa Unmei no Heroine ga Arawaremasu ga, Zantei Konyaku Life wo Mankitsushimasu! Anata no Noroi, Kiraware Akujo no Watashi ga Toicha Dame desu ka?” by Earth Star Luna. Released in North America by J-Novel Heart. Translated by Minna Lin.
It’s always dangerous when you’re making stew. When you have something that’s just “let’s throw as many common ingredients into the pot as we can, stir it up, and eat that for supper”. A lot of the time it just ends up being an ugly, overcomplicated mess. Sometimes, though, all the ingredients manage to coalesce into something really tasty. You wouldn’t dare call it original – the exact opposite – but the common muck ends up being just what you wanted. We get that here. This is a villainess story with a capital V, having all the trimmings, and yet it works because it doesn’t take itself remotely seriously (at times I wondered if it was actually trying to be a parody) and because it has a really good story to tell about love, and what happens to people who get it and people who don’t.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but we open the book with our main character being dumped publicly by her fiance, the second prince. Lucille was well-meaning and did her princess lessons well, but she knew the princess didn’t love her and was trying much too hard to change that. Now she’s engaged to the “cursed marquess”. Felix. This causes her to pass out… and when she wakes up she has memories of her past… eight lives. Yes, this is her ninth life, but her first as a human. In the previous eight, she was a beloved pet cat of some of the most influential and powerful people in history. And what’s more, she has a prophecy, which shows her pissing off Felix, getting into dark magic, and being killed by the Saint who’ll be arriving in a year. Fortunately, with her past memories and her premonitions, she can change literally everything about this plot.
A lot of this just made me laugh. It’s always nice to see an isekai’d Japanese girl who’s part of the supporting cast rather than the lead – one of Lucille’s past owners was a reincarnator who loved her “smol” kitty. The second prince is a buffoon who cannot recognize that the beautiful woman in front of him is his ex-fiancee, just not wearing heavy makeup, and it just gets sillier and sillier as he rants. But there’s also some really good stuff here. Lucille, being an ex-cat, does not remotely worry about what anyone thinks of her and is very confident. And she’s surrounded by people who are filled with self-loathing or self-doubt, ranging from the cursed Marquess to her new friend Mary Hunt… erm, Alice Rohans, who suffers from being the normal one in a generation of geniuses, to her own father, who is caring but it comes out as uncaring. If there’s a weakness, it’s that the dialogue can seem a bit TOO overly elaborate. Sometimes these people speak as if they’re reading words off a page rather than being in the moment.
This has a second volume coming, which I assume will resolve the curse as well as the cliffhanger we saw. If you liked Lady Bumpkin, and you liked Bakarina, and wondered what would happen if you smashed them together, this is that book.
0 Comments