After successfully changing the past, uh now the present, to prevent her death at the hands of revolutionaries in the future, Princess Mia’s life should be much easier, right? Well, there was that mysterious history book she found in the school library at the end of volume 2 that portended an unhappy fate for her, and there were those agitators behind the scenes who decided that when the Tearmoon Empire refused to fall (thanks to Mia’s reforms) that they’d just go after another kingdom instead, but that’s not worth worrying about, right? Ah, if only Mia had another point of reference to help her avoid these bad futures now that her old diary is gone, a lodestone you might say!
What’s this? You say that her granddaughter from the future, Miabel, has somehow tumbled back into the past after avoiding a fate much like Mia’s own and has brought with her an (embellished) history book of where it all went wrong?
Oh dear, Mia’s not going to have the relaxing time she thought she was is she?
While Tearmoon Empire was originally conceived as a one arc story, meaning it would have ended at the end of volume 2, creator Nozomu Mochitsuki has pulled together another arc which does have a lot of the same elements but not to worry, it’s not a retread of past events. Mia is still herself, which is to say someone who would rather be relaxing in a tea party than ruling an empire, but after all the adventures she’s had Mia is also a girl who has a good sense of her own limitations and a nicely growing network of people to lean on, I mean, ask for help when needed!
Funny enough, the lemony narration is back in full swing but now it’s spending less with talking about how Mia’s allies constantly misinterpret her actions (although we hear plenty of their internal thoughts to know that they still do) and Mia’s own thoughts match up with the narrator more as well. For instance, upon realizing that her granddaughter’s name sounds like a portmanteau of hers and Abel’s names, Mia’s first thought is “my children/Bel’s parents must have loved us very much to come up with that name, how silly.” Bel quickly informs her that Mia herself came up with it and Mia subsequently starts howling internally at her future self asking her just what she was thinking, the narrator doesn’t even need to snark here! While Tearmoon Empire isn’t in a stable time-loop, I do wonder if by knowing this forbidden knowledge if Mia is doomed to once again name one of her grandchildren after her own ship name…
Abel and Sion don’t actually appear very often in this volume, but a number of other reoccurring characters do and I was very glad for the character page at the beginning of the volume. I do wish it had been a bit more extensive — even if it had listed character names without a headshot that would have been fine, since so many new characters were added in during the later parts of the second volume that I couldn’t quite keep everyone straight. Student council president Rafina is also a larger player here than she was in the first two books and for the silliest of reasons: as best as Bel can remember, the turning point that led to the bad timeline she came from, where a group called the “Chaos Serpents” really started shifting the fate of countries, derived from Rafina winning yet another election to be student council president and, since Mia can’t manage to convince any of her other allies to run, it’s into the fire and time to give politics her best shot!
In short, it’s a lot of the same fun from the first two volumes, although I was a little surprised at how abruptly this volume ended. I would have much preferred a few more chapters for a smoother ending rather than the side stories we got instead (although the side stories were perfectly fine background material for the story). I do wonder what Bel’s eventual fate will be, if she’ll be in this timeline forever now or if she’ll somehow be pulled back to her time/vanish once Mia further thwarts the Chaos Serpents’ plans. I’m delighted that this is one of the series that J-Novel Club is starting to release in print as well as digital, I can’t wait until I can have my own copies of the “Princess Mia Chronicles,” I mean Tearmoon Empire, on my physical shelves!