Something a very different today. I discovered a new genre.
My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.
Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.
The Apothecary Diaries # 1 by Natsu Hyunga illustrations by Touko Shino
One of the booktubers I watch named the 11th volume of this series as one of her three favorite books of the month, and went on to say how much she liked the series. The premise she described sounded interesting since I like stories set in China, or something resembling China, and this story was described being that of a young girl making her way from the bottom up in a Chinese style court, with a mix of court intrigue and humor, all of which gave me Emma M Lion vibes. So I tracked it down both on Amazon and at our local library. All off which led me down something of a rabbit hole, which is the main purpose of this "review." But first a quick summery of the series.
This is a series of "light novels" featuring a young woman who was kidnapped and sold to the imperial court as a washer of clothes for the concubines of the emperor. Her father was a doctor, and she had acted as an apprentice and aide to him before she was abducted. In this first volume she inadvertently calls attention to herself with her medical knowledge. It seems that two of the concubines, having given birth to children who would become a prince and a princess, are wasting away, along with their infants. She recognized the reason why this is happening and contrives to warn them. One takes her advice, and both the mother and child recover, while the other doesn't, and the would-be prince dies, and his mother continues to waste away. This is as far as I got in the story itself.
I only read the first six chapters of this book, but I'm not going to count it as a DNF, since I was reading the sample pages on Amazon in order to get the flavor of the story. It would hardly be fair to say I DNFed it because in fact, I just stopped reading it when the sample ran out.
I was interested enough in the story to see if my local library had copies. In the online catalog they -seemingly - did have the first three volumes "on order," with a fairly short waiting list for them. I say "seemingly," because I discovered that there are two versions of this story. One is a manga and the other is the "light novel."
What, you may ask, is a light novel? I did. So I asked Google. Here a summery of the AI response:
A light novel is a style of Japanese novel that typically targets teenagers and young adults and is characterized by its short length, simple language and inclusion of manga-style illustrations. They are primarily markets to middle and high school students, but with a readership that extends to young adults and older readers. They are comparable to a novella, ranging from 40K to 50K words and frequently include both color and black and white illustrations in an anime or manga style.
Well, I learned something new. I further discovered that the books available at the library were the manga version of the story. I've never been a very ardent comic book reader, and have never even dipped my toes into manga or anime, and have no desire to. So if I wanted to read the light novel version of the story, I'd have to buy the books. I looked into getting the books second hand on Abe Books, my fist place to look when I consider buying a book, but the prices, including shipping were just about the same as new on Amazon. And with the ebook versions going for $8 each and not in Kindle Unlimited, they were also not an option, as anything for than $5 for a digital file is more than I am willing to pay. I'd rather pay more for a real, paper book.
However, returning to the story itself; the sample I read was certainly written at a middle school level, simple and direct, but cheerful enough. However, being a reader of writing rather than story, I found the writing rather sparse for my taste, though, as I said, its sparseness did have some charm to it. But not enough for me to pay money to read it. That said, I think that when one considers that there are currently 15 books in the series, which is to say, a story of more than half a million words, I can see that its simplicity might be very misleading, and how one might well get drawn into the story. If you could afford it.
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