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Review of “Ascendance of a Bookworm” by Miya Kazuki

EisahJan 1, 2023, 6:40:40 PM

Manga:

Light Novel:

While I was waiting for the light novel to be available I ended up checking on the manga. So, I’ll review the manga, then the light novel, and make a comparison.

Manga:

Myne wakes up suddenly with memories of her past life as a book lover. Now, she’s a sickly little girl. She loves books so much all she wants to do is read, but on this new world books are a rarity that only rich people have.

Dealing with a weak constitution, Myne tries to figure out how she can get her hands on books when she was born into a poor family and is just a little girl. Eventually, she remembers how Egyptians made their own paper with fibers from plants.

It ends with her having gotten plant fibers to make one or two sheets of paper.

What I enjoyed about the manga was that it seemed very well put together. Right away there was a map and a layout of her house to make it easier to picture. When she’s reborn into a medieval-like world, it’s far more realistic than a lot of other isekai stories. It’s dirty. People don’t know about things like germs. People are generally illiterate. The amount of care and education people get is rather low, and they have to do things like stock up on food for the winter.

Even though their parents have a sick child, they never consider that how dirty the house is could be causing it. There are many real life troubles that someone from the modern age would clearly be able to see that people in olden times wouldn’t know. It’s also not simply easy for her to get a bit of money and immediately buy paper. There’s no reason anyone would even be selling paper to peasants, and it would be far more expensive than they would ever be willing to pay.

She also has the basic idea of what Egyptians used to make paper, but she’s not actually sure how to do the whole process, so trying to make her own paper will require a lot of work and experimentation. It’s a good setup.

I think the weakest thing is actually Myne’s love for books. We know she loves books, but sometimes this love overtakes other things that she should be more concerned about, and we’re not really given a reason why beyond “she loves books”. I also like books, but if I was suddenly in medieval times I think learning how to survive and applying modern knowledge to real life would take precedent. Myne does this a little bit, but a lot of the time she just obsesses about books.

I think this could have been solved by giving her a reason she likes books. There is no deeper connection given beyond it being her hobby to read. If she’s going to be this obsessed, maybe give her a backstory where she was sick in the hospital and her mother reading to her was her only entertainment, so she fell in love with books. Anything to make her reading a little more personal to her and not just a hobby she’s obsessive about.

Otherwise it was a cute manga, beautifully drawn, and applied a lot more realism to the scenario than most stories.

Light Novel:

The light novel pretty much follows the same beats as the manga, but it covers further into the story. She has failed at copying the Egyptians methods of making papyrus. She tries clay tablets. She tries mokkan (basically wood). She gets a slate as well. Many of her attempts fail, but she makes some small amount of progress as well, and also finds ways to re-make other things from her world. For example, she handcrafts a little flowery hairclip for Tuuli for her baptism, with help from her dad and mom.

The books ends with her helping Lutz, a neighborhood boy, get an interview to try and become a traveling merchant, but he’s talked down into being a city merchant’s apprentice instead. He’ll work to make Myne’s inventions a reality, and then they’ll have something unique to offer for trade. But, a little after this, we get some more glimpses into the fantasy element of this book. Importantly, that Myne might be ill with something that will kill her if she doesn’t have the right tools to deal with it, and only nobles have the tools. However, if she contracted to work for a noble in order to get the tools, she’d basically be a slave her whole life.

We get introduced to the concept of mana at the end, since usually only nobility have mana and peasants don’t know much about it.

I’ll start off with what bothered me the most. The books. It was better than in the manga, but Myne’s obsession with books can come off as borderline psychotic at times, at least in the first half. There is a brief mention that Myne’s original book room was left behind by her now deceased father, which gives us more reason why she might become obsessed with them than the manga did. However, that’s about one sentence. Was she a Daddy’s girl and then he died, and the books remind her of him? I don’t know, because it doesn’t explore it further, so even though we get a bit of a hint why she might be obsessed with books it’s really only stated as if it was explaining how she had such a book room, and didn’t present it as her being particularly attached to her dad at any point (it actually drills in that she didn’t know her father and doesn’t even know how to interact with a dad because of it).

It would have been nice if she maybe had vague memories of sitting on his lap while he read more advanced books than what was usual for her age, which would establish a clearer reason for why she became enamored with them.

Generally the light novel is written well and runs through the tough life peasants like them would have, doing things like stocking up to try and survive the winter and slaughtering animals. Myne can be sensible about this stuff to a degree, but then books will often interrupt in a jarring way. It’s almost like the author feels like it’s getting sidetracked by acknowledging that other things need to get done in order for them to survive, and has to throw in her suddenly bringing up books to remind you that she’s obsessed with books.

But at times it comes off like, if her mother was on her death bed, she would think about how “it’ll be even harder to get books now!” It made her seem like she’s not even attempting to get close to other characters at the start. She does things on occasion to get things back from them, and not so much because she cares about them or because she’s being nice, and it feels like that mostly happens because the author isn’t sure how to keep the story related to books. It’s too impossible for her to get them, and she’s trying to keep the subject relevant.

It could have toned that down and still been fine. Instead of forcing it in a jarring way, Myne could have seen opportunities and gone for them as they came up. And yes, she could have gone out looking for opportunities, too, but it didn’t have to make her seem like she was unable to think or care about anything else without intrusive thoughts of books.

Now, it would be interesting if this was related to her being a child, because rather than a grown young woman reincarnated as a child, she often comes off as a plain petulant child with a bit of extra knowledge. If this is because she’s literally functioning with a child’s brain which isn’t fully developed, that could be interesting. I’m not sure it’ll ever go that deep into it, though.

All that said, this is the best written light novel that I’ve seen thus far, and I don’t want to oversell my complaints. The author took care in creating a realistic setting and describing the type of place Myne lived. Myne herself is a generally good character who usually works fine, being neither a saint nor a devil. She helps out people sometimes and she uses people sometimes, like a lot people do. My complaints particularly centered around the first half of the book where her interest in books would sometimes interrupt an otherwise fine scene and feel more forced or out of place, and make her seem detached because of it. That lessened in the second half of the book. Honestly, I feel like it could have easily been tweaked for everything to work out without her coming off that way and still hit the same plot points.

Even though the story goes through general life, the characters are realistic, also being individuals just doing what they need to do. They get annoyed sometimes, they’re happy sometimes, they vary between supporting what Myne’s doing and being irritated by it depending on what it is… The world feels very believable despite the sometimes very strange elements suddenly thrown in, like mushrooms that’ll dance if you don’t burn them first.

Myne’s amount of success also varies a lot. In her efforts to create a paper substitute, she fails many times. Often because she’s too weak or frail to do the work. Other people don’t understand what she’s doing, so sometimes they destroy her work. At other times things don’t turn out as expected, like when she tries to heat up her clay and it explodes. She struggles quite a bit throughout the book.

On the other hand she is able to get a slate. She also makes other little things based on her Japanese knowledge. For example, she puts together food trying to imitate Japanese flavors, and makes dishes with ingredients no one else thought was usable. She uses a simple hair stick for her hair. She comes up with a way to use oil to clean her and Tuuli’s hair. These little things she manages to do to make her situation better – but by the end of the book it’s added up for people to notice that she’s being very inventive compared to the other people in the city.

And it’s sensible that they would notice this – Otto, for example, is shocked by how well she does math without even using an abacus. She can just write down the numbers on her slate and figure out. Of course, this is because she knows how to multiply from her last life, but it’s uncommonly advanced for a peasant, and especially advanced for a tiny child. So it makes sense that by the end, Benno, the merchant, would be considering what they can do with her. Now that she has Lutz agreeing to do the work making her inventions – something she couldn’t do herself because of her weak body – she’s going to be making completely new stuff that will be wreaking havoc on the markets.

How she’s standing out from the crowd comes across naturally in the book and the actions and reactions are sensible on all sides. By the end she’s told Benno that she’ll have her prototype of paper not made from animal skins soon, all while hinting that more is going on in the background. It’s a great setup for the beginning of the overall story that starts small and builds up over time.

Because of that, I would absolutely recommend Ascendance of a Bookworm to anyone interested in isekai novels or light novels. I won’t pretend I didn’t have my issues with the story, but it’s overall excellent.

Next time, “I'm the Villainess, So I'm Taming the Final Boss Volume 1” by Sarasa Nagase.

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