“Oh you hapless fools; the confusion and chaos were so very far from over.”
Our trials and tribulations begins with main character Karen in the nadir of her life but it’s not unreasonably dreadful. (Re-)Born into the Kirsten noble family, a branch family of the Dunsts, it was revealed several years before the story begins that her mother had been unfaithful and the Dunsts insist that the result of this folly, Karen, be kicked out of the family and made to live as a commoner (the fact that Karen’s mother forgot all of her memories of raising Karen and has felt detached about the whole incident ever since feels strange but it remains to be seen if that will be some kind of plot point in this world of magic or if it’s simply a writing quirk). Now that Karen is almost ready to graduate from her secondary school she is seeking employment and finding that the Dunst resentment towards the circumstances of her birth runs even deeper than she expected and that she might not even be able to find a job (other than “retail clerk” or “barmaid”) due to their behind-the-scenes pressure campaign, something that she can do nothing about.
But Karen isn’t the only one who has been busy over the past few years: her older (half-)sister has become the sole concubine of the king of Fulkrum and her conditions for doing so were:
- Restore Karen to being a member of the Kirsten family and
- Given that the Dunsts will immediately try to marry her off, as the only begrudging way they would want to
useaccept Karen, to make sure that Karen actually has a choice in suitors and the final say
As a result, Karen is whisked away to a family meeting and given her options: the Dunsts have proposed a marriage between Karen and the elderly, widowed margrave (aka, the ruler of a border region not near the capital) of the Conrad domain and her sister has somehow secured a competing proposal from the second son of a marquis, Reinald Rodenwald, who is much closer to Karen’s age, dashing, and interestingly enough has turned down all potential proposals before.
For Karen the choice is obvious: marry the old guy because he’ll pass on earlier and then she’ll be free to travel and do whatever she wants!
Karen’s plan to spend a quiet few years being married and off to the frontier almost immediately begins to go sideways when she arrives at the frontier and discovers that the margrave, while not officially remarried, does have a common law wife and son and that this dynamic is going to be not what she expected (and the margrave had thought Karen’s family was aware of this situation). While Karen does still become the margravine on paper, she is treated more like an unexpected daughter and potential heir to the territory than the margrave’s “wife” and treated warmly, and even though Karen never explicitly says so it seems like this is very possibly the happiest part of her life so far. She is given both the freedom and responsibilities that show she is respected as an adult and no one plans to oppose her plans to travel once she reaches 20 (this idea does concern some people in the domain but all they ask is that if something were to happen that she would remain in Conrad until the legal heir comes of age, which Karen agrees to, and she’s given a full education in running a territory just in case).
Karen is less-than-thrilled to be called back to the capital a few times and, quite awkwardly, is reunited with Reinald on more than a few occasions; Reinald says that “I am going to be the source of some trouble for you yet,” and while he meant it in the sense of “now every young lady whose offer of marriage I turned down is going to harass you for turning me down,” Reinald has quite a few secrets of his own and they’re all rather dicey and dangerous. He is able to save Karen from a sexual assault (a scene that definitely requires a trigger warning for how tense it is and how close Karen comes to being physically raped) because of these connections but even by the end of this first volume I can’t quite be sure where his loyalties lie. I would not be surprised if he and Karen end up together (romantically) by the end of this series however and watching the two of them slowly, but naturally, become closer as they speak plainly of their own circumstances, and discover that their interests are rather aligned, has been nice. But this is a story with magic and war growing on the horizon, as the volume progresses it becomes clear that Karen is being pulled into the consequences of decades of decisions and deliberations made by people both in Karen’s Kingdom of Falkrum and in the Empire that she hopes to travel to, and war is something that will disrupt even the best-laid of plans.
At some point while reading this volume I started mentally referring to this series as “The Trials and Tribulations of my Next Life as a Noblewomen: All Routes Lead to Doom!” because it really does seem like there was no nice and easy path for Karen to follow in her isekai’d life: there are too many other plots and predicaments afoot by other characters and at this point she can only navigate the paths other characters are building, not create them on her own. “This is a story of living in the moments of time in which a generation shifts, and the circumstances and history of a continent changes” is what author Kamihara writes in the afterword and it’s true: Karen is no royal, politician, or king-maker. She’s in some ways a “normal” noble hoping to live a life where any excitement is on a personal level and quite frankly she’d rather avoid the politicking that most “normal” nobles seem to relish!
Alas that was not meant to be. Even before I accidentally spoiled myself silly looking up future volume covers (this is one of the series where you absolutely cannot do that it turns out!) and the sense of tension was palpable as the volume drew to a close, the question among my friends and I became not “if” any characters would die by the end but “who” or “how many”. If these books were available to me in complete form I’d binge them without a thought, screw unimportant responsibilities like “getting enough sleep on a work night” or that this is possibly the largest book J-Novel Club has ever released (in “streaming” form it was released as 20, roughly equal-sized parts, beating out Ascendence of a Bookworm and the quite large volume 12 of The Apothecary Diaries) and it’s been a little while since a new series grabbed me so intensely.
I am now desperately awaiting the start of volume 2 on J-NC’s site and may even buy the digital copy of this first volume so I can have it on-hand to refer to while reading the newest parts; it’s clear that Kamihara was very deliberate on what was included in this book so I’m eager to see how things keep building upon these trials and tribulations. The only saving grace is that Karen is clearly “writing” all of this down from a point in the future so I know that she survives it all in the end!