Holiday Review: ASCENDANCE OF A BOOKWORM

Yet from the dregs of countless isekai adaptations came the slow and steady return of shojo isekai.  Most of it is still confined to light novels, but one managed to cross over and completely charm me.

ASCENDANCE OF A BOOKWORM (Honzuki no Gekokujou), based on the light novel by Miya Kazuki and character designs by You Shiina, with art by Suzuka.  First published in 2015 and first published in North America in 2019.

PLOT:

The last thing Urano Motosu remembered was watching her beloved room of books collapse upon her during an earthquake.  When she awakens, she finds herself reincarnated within the body of the sickly five-year-old peasant girl Myne.  This is a world where class differences are stark, literacy is uncommon, and books are handmade luxuries available only to nobility.  Thus, Myne decides that if she cannot buy books in her new life, she will teach herself how to make books.

STORY:

While I started watching anime a good decade or so later than a lot of my peers, the early days of my fandom were defined in part by shojo isekai works like Magic Knight Rayearth and Escaflowne.  I love them so much that I've done con panels talking about shows and manga like them from the 1990s.  Sadly, they fell out of fashion last decade and the rise of the modern isekai has been on increasingly tedious, video-game influenced, and sometimes offensive male power fantasies.  Based on that standard, Ascendance of a Bookworm would be novel simply by virtue of having a child heroine instead of a teen hero, but there's a lot more that makes this story special.

Ascendance of a Bookworm is simply structured differently than most modern isekai.  Myne is not a Chosen One.  She has no great quest to achieve, no incredible destiny handed to her upon her rebirth.  She's poor and lower-class in a world where social class is everything, so she can't buy her way out of trouble.  She has no special powers beyond whatever knowledge she accumulated as Urano.  If anything, her small size, lack of strength and tendency towards chronic fevers leaves her at a major disadvantage.  All she has is her brains and determination, but that is enough to lift Myne out of her lowest moments and become the heroine of her own life.

There's something of a casual, lived-in pace to her story.  Myne's quest for books is a long one with many steps, starting with her trying to figure out how to make various forms of paper.  In the meantime, she learns about the world: her new family, the city around her, and the seasonal rhythms of peasant life.  There's a great deal of emphasis on crafting, be it Myne's making simple comforts for herself or helping her family with things like candlemaking or making basic shampoo.

An interesting side effect of this (one that I'm certain is intentional) is that Myne is forced to engage with the world and others directly.  We don't get many glimpses of her life as Urano but what little we learn suggests that she was so obsessed with books to the exclusion of everything else.  It's only now that she can actually start to bond with others and physically interact with the world.  Like a lot of reincarnation-based isekai stories, Myne's getting a second shot at life.  She just doesn't know it yet.

ART:

Suzuki's art isn't too far removed from the original illustrations save for how they draw the children.  Myne, her sister Tulli, and the other kids around them are drawn smaller, rounder, and more baby-like than the others around them.  While this emphasizes just how small and young Myne is compared to her mental self, it loses something of the charm of Shiina's original designs.  Otherwise the art is perfectly functional, although there's a greater emphasis on backgrounds (and background detail) than one normally sees in these sorts of light novel adaptations.

PRESENTATION:

This is one of the rare times that I've actually read the light novel the manga is adapting!  As an adaptation, it works well.  It retains most of the events of the first volume, but skips right to Myne's reincarnation at the beginning and eliminates most of Myne's inner monologue.

RATING:


Ascendance of a Bookworm is the sort of modern shojo isekai that I've been waiting for.  The premise is unique, the tone is cozy, and Myne is an engaging heroine in her own fashion.  I can't recommend this hard enough.

This series is published by J-Novel Club.  This series is complete in Japan with 7 volumes available.  1 volume has been released digitally and is currently in print.

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