As the saying goes, you have to spend money to earn money. Chloe, an alchemist, has earned quite of bit of cash and a good rep, but as a mage, she is limited as to how much she can fight monsters to earn ingredients. She needs muscle, and she’s found it — well, him.
And it’s not so much that she found him so much as she’s bought him.
Julius also happens to be a warrior from another country who made a name for himself during the war: The Black Prince. But he was seemingly turned over as part of peace negotiations, and he ended up available to be purchased as a slave. Chloe has no intention of being a cruel master, but sometimes, this self-proclaimed unluckiest girl in the world thinks she’s the one being ordered around instead of Julius.
The Abandoned Heiress Gets Rich with Alchemy and Scores an Enemy General! is likely going to be associated with Sugar Apple Fairy Tale, as both are female-oriented works about a working single gal buying a handsome older guy to fight for them. But unlike Anne, Chloe doesn’t make any promises of Julius’ freedom. I know many people are uneasy with Sugar Apple Fairy Tale due to the slavery aspect, and thus this novel may be even harder for readers to accept.
In the opening chapter, Chloe emphasizes she favors money, and treating Julius well (ceding her bed to him, bathing him, buying him whatever equipment he wants, etc.) is going to give her a better return-on-investment. She’s also not so money-hungry that she can’t sympathize with Julius’ situation. In fact, she empathizes with Julius as fallen nobles. But Chloe has managed to run a successful shop, and we see a variety of her creations throughout the story, like creating a new eye for Julius early in the novel.
These types of actions and Chloe’s general half-joking boasting helps Julius warm up to Chloe, and he offers to help her seek revenge on her half-sister who ended up marrying Chloe’s former fiancé, the current king. Chloe’s backstory falls into the old villainess tropes, but this turns out to be one of the most unique points of the novel. I won’t discuss this much because it ties directly to the ending, but suffice to say, it’s not often the abandoned fiancée stays in the kingdom, especially one who had been imprisoned.
Unfortunately, the shift to this final conflict is very abrupt. And Chloe makes perhaps one of the most obvious blunders ever to wind up in trouble. With the novel being written from her perspective, we know a lot of her confidence is to hide (or at least step away from) her passive past, but she almost couldn’t step into a landmine any harder if she tried. It also doesn’t help there is a big to-do when Chloe is starting to fall for Julius with a potential rival love interest who everyone around finds annoying. He is loud, but he is almost bashed more in the story than Chloe’s ex-fiancé or half-sister.
Julius encourages Chloe to seek revenge against them, and I have to give the author credit for showing that Julius does because he thinks it’d be to Chloe’s benefit rather than a possible get-out-of-slavery plan or for sport. Despite his situation and past, Julius is not as abrasive as is typical for the genre. He also has a dragon he cares about greatly, and it’s a lot of fun to see from Chloe’s perspective how she thinks Julius is practically married to his flying lizard steed, Helios.
I like the three of them as a family, and ultimately, it’s the family aspects (both good and bad) that drove my interest in The Abandoned Heiress Gets Rich with Alchemy and Scores an Enemy General! But the shift between Chloe and Julius (with Helios) to Chloe’s past is rather disjointed, and the author doesn’t always make the best use of pagetime. I’m not sure if certain aspects were kept open-ended intentionally or if this was akin to a superhero flying around at the end of their origin story movie. With new revelations at the end, I would assume a volume 2 is likely, but for those just reading for the romance, I can see how a continuation is unnecessary.
Ultimately, despite the upsetting setup, The Abandoned Heiress Gets Rich with Alchemy and Scores an Enemy General! has the prospect to be very good, but all its parts just didn’t quite come together here.