Ribbon
Royal magic school seems like a good place to insert some conflict into this story, but nope it's very calm. Claire observes another girl being bullied but it's resolved without incident. Her governess job is perfectly pleasant as well.
A big magic tornado threatens the city and we get to see Claire use her newly upgraded magic to help. Backstory for the kingdoms is explored and there are hints that political machinations may be afoot but nothing materializes.
Relaxing manga continues to be relaxing, but even I find myself hoping something will actually happen.
This is going to be a very slow burn healing love story, isn't it? Miyo is tentatively opening up to the idea that she's not utterly worthless. Kudo finds ways to stealthily improve her situation. The scenes from the perspective of the deranged half sister are the best part.
Art-wise, Miyo gets a wardrobe upgrade with really gorgeous kimonos and accessories.
A romance between a pathetic woman and a cold man. Miyo is the only non-magical person in her family and was thus abused and neglected. Kudo is a high ranking military officer in a magic-focused unit.
This volume is pure misery. The perspective alternates between Miyo and Kudo, so we get her non-existent self esteem and his struggle to figure her out. Zero joy, humor, or even cuteness to be found.
Better than the cover art, less farming than the series name.
Zoey plays the MMO for story and roleplaying with NPCs and gets a unique quest as the only person who qualifies. She has a very healthy relationship with her professor dad, who also plays and tries to support her in her low-reward questing.
Aspen has some mysterious past stuff going on, where his levels got dropped to that of a baby and his animal buddies have to keep him alive. Animal buddies include goat dad Khal, spider mom Sumi, and little sister Silus. That's not their family structure but it's their roles in the group. The names Sumi and Silus are way too close visually, making it hard to remember which is which.
We see a good chunk of Zoey's real world life, not just time spent in a pod.
Prophecy Approved Companion is set inside a game but the main character is an NPC rather than a human player. Qube should have died in an opening cutscene but the hero manages to glitch the game so she survives. She tags along as he continues to break the world.
The first third of the book is okay, but as Qube deviates from her programming the story picks up. Qube is an interesting perspective character and her eventual existential crisis's are delicious. The Chosen One starts out obnoxious but gets better over time. Other companion characters join up as the story progresses.
The game world and game story feel like an old school RPG, similar to Lunar: The Silver Star Story. The tone is mostly light and humorous. One of the companion characters is the “sexy” archetype, who makes constant innuendo that usually falls flat. The game censors the player's swearing. I'd call it fine for younger teens.
An old lady reminisces about when her cat was a kitten. All the stories are short and adorable and have no more conflict than “kitty made a mess.” Don't expect anything deep, just a warm fuzzy to give you the warm fuzzies.
I have mixed feelings about this volume. The story being in the world of a dating sim finally becomes relevant but it's used to restart the story and do things differently. Nearly everything that happened before now is undone. It's both interesting and frustrating.
Past the frustrating setup parts of volume 1, we've entered pure awesomeness. The brothers aren't on the verge of killing Penelope anymore but she decides they're too dangerous. Instead she unlocks the remaining two routes. I like all the boys except Prince Psycho. Looking forward to seeing how Penelope can tempt death next.
If most LitRPGs are like Dungeons and Dragons or role-playing video games, Goddess Reborn is a board game. Sammy's initial followers are whoever happened to be speaking in front of a mirror when she was looking around. They're scattered around several countries where an anti-religion group called the Dominion hold sway. Sammy tries to keep her pawns on the board, gain new ones, and move the pieces closer together, all while avoiding the notice of the Dominion and more powerful gods.
Sammy the isekai protagonist is a college student who's into Tarot and swears a lot. I'm not a Tarot enthusiast so I can't say if the Tarot elements are well done, but at least some of it is intentionally bad. The system running this world didn't bother getting it right and Sammy gets annoyed it's so simplistic here.
Sammy also has her public persona as Samantha, Virgin Goddess of Mirrors. This persona has a soothing voice and comes off as sweet and innocent. In spreading her influence and hiding her identity, she develops even more personas, all very different.
The system messages are very repetitive. Every time Sammy gains a new follower, there are four lines of system text. When she gets daily faith points for followers, a message is given for each one until she fixes it to just give a total. I suspect this book would be an hour or two shorter if the system messages were pruned down.
The audiobook has two readers. The female reader voices all female characters and all general narration. The male reader voices all male characters as well as the system messages. They both do a wide variety of accents/voices. Some characters are a little quieter than others but mostly the production is solid and even.
This is a very sweet Christmas story for anyone who wants a break from the classics but without sacrificing the cozy mood. Short enough to read to the kids before bed on Christmas Eve!
This is a fun book of prompts for any fantasy tabletop game. They're split up by setting, so if the party is in a village you'd flip to the village chapter and roll percentile dice. The prompts range from serious to goofy and often are open to both violent and non-violent approaches. Some are based around classic fairy tales or movies like Home Alone.
The “Game Master Tools” section has tables for individual elements like NPC motivations and locations. I wish it had more tables here, as it's impossible to create an encounter using only the tables provided.
Minor quibble: This book was written by multiple people and feels like it. Some prompts reference “the players”, others reference “you”, and others don't mention the players at all.
A whole family gets portaled to a fantasy world with light LitRPG elements just before Christmas. They get to choose their fantasy race, class, and talent when they arrive and the main character, a transgirl, is able to magically change to being biologically female as well. The family gets settled in, there's almost no conflict, and it's just a pleasant wish fulfilling time.
About halfway through there's some God and Jesus talk, which took me by surprise. The “A Christmas Story” should have been a hint but it's such a non-secular holiday in my experience that I forgot.
Aliens give Earth advance notice that a “system apocolypse” is going to activate, giving people time to prepare. Bad news for anyone who thinks “strength in numbers” is a good idea, because population centers seem to attract stronger monsters.
That's not an issue for Haley. She's living with her grandma in a small rural town (southern United States, maybe Louisiana.) It has starting town energy - weak critter monsters and food items as quest rewards. Haley experiments with magic and helps her grandma figure out how things work now.
It's all very cozy, as the title suggests. There are a lot of Christian references and imagery. Grandma is very religious and Haley seems less so. Having read a bit of the second book, there's more God stuff to come so maybe skip the series if that's going to annoy you.
12/29/2023: Star rating reduced due to AI audiobook.
The art is very cute and clever, but the writing didn't do it for me. This author and illustrator have some fantasy creature + holiday picture books and I suspect those will be more enjoyable.
This book needed a few more rounds of editing. There's repetitive phrasing and repetitive information throughout. The worst offender is an early scene involving Sylph and Wisp, whose names are similar enough the author uses the wrong one several times.
After unofficially teaming up for the solo tournament, Damian and Sylph are now joined at the hip 90% of the time. Every student gets one more class, which they have separately, but those scenes are brief. The other dorm mates fall into the background beyond a few sparring sessions.
Action scenes are cool, developing spells is cool, finally seeing some quests is cool. I'm just disappointed by the execution.
Just another superhero origin story. It's well written but doesn't break any new ground and it's generally forgettable. Most of the characters are very simple - the rock star girl has music themed one liners, the Irish brawler tells tall tales, the younger girl is cuddly, etc. The main character is just another Peter Parker type.
Even though the Zodiac Legacy is prose, it's easy to picture the comic book panels throughout.
Expect lots of fight scenes and no conclusion at the end of the first book.
This third book has dropped the farming content to barely any. John and Ellie delegate most of the chores to others and focus on magical research instead. The last quarter of the book is an extended action sequence that seem to annoy and bore even the characters.
I probably won't bother continuing the series.
This book feels a lot more frantic than the first, as Arnold is juggling so many projects. Even delegating, he has tons of meetings to get updates and make decisions. Most of the characters we met in the first book return, so I recommend reading them back to back. It's really satisfying seeing Arnold work to resolve his farm projects and figure out what he might want to do next.
I don't know if more books are planned, but this book has a good ending if it is indeed the end.
Emily randomly gets super powers and loses all control over her life. The system decided she's a villain, which means every hero will want to capture her for easy skill points. Her power creates other sentient beings, “little sisters” who want to help her become the bestest villain ever. She never clearly explains to them she doesn't want to be a villain.
There's a mechanic to the morality system to move up or down the hero-villain scale but no indication that Emily or her sisters are making progress in either direction. She passes herself off as a hero among the local heroes, while local villains think she's an evil mastermind.
The sisters feel like the cast of a moe anime. They're preteens and their smallness is emphasized. The word “tummy” is used a lot and there's lots of cuddling and head pats. Teddy, the werebear sister, talks about poop a lot.
So many people involved in the film contribute their own voices to the audiobook, it feels more like an audio-documentary than a memoir. It's a nice, fluffy listen.
This series has certainly grown up rapidly. Nothing too intimate actually happens but there is a discussion that skirts around oral sex and some full frontal nudity. For a series that started at the high end of ‘middle grade', it's a bit shocking.
I do adore this series with its excessive use of silly long words and aversion to maintaining the status quo.
Rishe has the standard “otome villainess” backstory but the real catch is she's stuck in a time loop. Every life, she's pursued a different vocation and acquired different expertise but she always dies young. This time she bumps into a hot broody guy and he's the future evil emperor responsible, more or less, for every previous death.
It's fun seeing Rishe surprise others with her wide skill set and she doesn't come off as overpowered. Even her future knowledge doesn't include details of the political landscape leading up to the evil emperor's rise to power.
The art is gorgeous and in every flashback to previous lives Rishe has different outfits to drive home how different her paths were. Backgrounds feel alive and architecture is very pretty and realistic.
X-Men of fantasy Italy with character descriptions and behavior straight out of a generic anime! Bonus: First person from the perspective of a budding serial killer.
The repeated grammatical sin of “elites” is incredibly grating.
John Sutton was brought to another world a decade ago, fought in wars, and grew powerful. But that's over and he's settling down as a farmer. When he embraces the quiet life, the world begins to heal (Doom Points go down), but when he uses too much magic it gets worse. So he's an overpowered protagonist but he avoids using that power.
John grows some crops but the biggest focus in farm life is starting up a dairy. The setting has a frontier town feel like from an old Western and the narrator for the audiobook really leans into it. Locals are standoffish and bandits are the real law of the land. There isn't a “romance” but John does develop a fondness for the young woman who was taking care of the farm since the last owner died.
There is some violence and death, as one might expect from a Western. Antagonists treaten sexual assault but none is carried out.
The politics from book 2 continues but can't rescue the book from two simultaneous love triangles. Chapter after chapter of conflict hinges on passive aggressive refusal to be the first to say “I love you.” The rebellion is fleshed out slightly more, but only enough to make you frustrated that it's not fully explained.