Kaoru was living a normal, content life on Earth before a freakish divine intervention left her very dead. As an apology, Kaoru has been given a chance to live in another world like ours and she convinces that world’s god to throw in some “service” to give her all the skills she would need to have a comfortable life. In a world of monsters and adventure, choosing to be a potion-maker is sure to set her up for life right?
Well, not exactly since no one else in the world can do anything remotely like what she can!
I’m starting to get annoyed at the trend of isekai protagonists continuously amazing their new world with all kinds of inventions and theories they remember from Earth. This is something Kaoru spends arguably as much time doing as she does creating miraculous potions, which works in some instances. In Log Horizon, it’s an entire group of characters who are trying to recreate aspects of the game in their new lives, not a single person reinventing government and economic trade from the ground up. And while Myne in Ascendance of the Bookworm has the potential to revolutionize all of society on her own, what she’s doing is simply drawing upon her past experience in handiwork and crafts to recreate items; it’s other characters that realize some of the larger implications of her inventions and help to actually spread them.
We don’t know much about Kaoru’s past life, just that it was a relatively quiet one where she was content in an office job so the multiple instances where she provides ground-breaking economic advice to merchants and princes felt out of place. Sure she could have had an interest in these subjects in her former life, but there’s no context like that given for her knowledge other than a “Oh I heard this story about a retailer who’s promotion didn’t work out” line or two. It made the attention she received as a result feel very unearned, as if I was supposed to marvel at her quick wits and not wonder how she developed such fast thinking in the first place.
It makes her feel like a boring kind of Mary Sue; a “fun” kind of Mary Sue feels like an indulgence, like a dessert you don’t eat very often, as you follow their wish-fulfillment adventures and successes, as they’re characters who make the readers feel happy and entertained afterwards. But Kaoru is a far more boring character — it’s as if the author expects the readers to praise her actions and successes when we don’t really see her do anything to earn praise. She manages to get herself out of several sticky situations, like accidentally attracting the attention of multiple noble and royal families with her ability to create any potion, but that’s mostly because of everyone else being under-prepared to deal with a person containing otherworldly knowledge and powers, not because of anything Kaoru actually does!
Speaking of boring, the in-chapter illustrations for this volume were rather lackluster, honestly feeling more like half-way completed sketches than finished pieces. The prose itself was also a bit odd: the story would shift back and forth without warning between Kaoru’s first-person narration and a third-person omniscient narrator, even when the story was following Kaoru and would switch back to her point of view one paragraph later! I’m not entirely sure what FUNA was trying to accomplish with this style but I feel confident in saying they failed; there were also some individual sentences that read strangely and I had to re-read three or more times to parse them, sentences with multiple negatives or negatives that seemed to contradict the previous sentence. I’m not sure if these were adaptation errors that slipped past the English staff or if they were present in the original, but given the odd narration I wouldn’t be surprised if it was either!
There are so many isekai light novel series out there these days that this one honestly isn’t really worth a look unless you really want something low-key and simply don’t care if the main character is boring. Dull stories like this make me feel tired of isekai as a whole, which is the absolute last feeling you want a book to inspire in someone!