Could have been much worse!
Genres: Fantasy, Contemporary or Urban Fantasy, New Adult
Representation: Korean MC
Protagonist Age: 29
Published on: 30th April 2024
ISBN: B0CG6BGRBN
Goodreads
A millennial turned magical girl must combat climate change and credit card debt in this delightful, witty, and wildly imaginative ode to magical girl manga.
Twenty-nine, depressed, and drowning in credit card debt after losing her job during the pandemic, a millennial woman decides to end her troubles by jumping off Seoul’s Mapo Bridge.
But her suicide attempt is interrupted by a girl dressed all in white—her guardian angel. Ah Roa is a clairvoyant magical girl on a mission to find the greatest magical girl of all time. And our protagonist just may be that special someone.
But the young woman’s initial excitement turns to frustration when she learns being a magical girl in real life is much different than how it’s portrayed in stories. It isn’t just destiny—it’s work. Magical girls go to job fairs, join trade unions, attend classes. And for this magical girl there are no special powers and no great perks, and despite being magical, she still battles with low self-esteem. Her magic wand . . . is a credit card—which she must use to defeat a terrifying threat that isn’t a monster or an intergalactic war. It’s global climate change. Because magical girls need to think about sustainability, too.
Park Seolyeon reimagines classic fantasy tropes in a novel that explores real-world challenges that are both deeply personal and universal: the search for meaning and the desire to do good in a world that feels like it’s ending. A fun, fast-paced, and enchanting narrative that sparkles thanks to award-nominated translator Anton Hur, A Magical Girl Retires reminds us that we are all magical girls—that fighting evil by moonlight and winning love by daylight can be anyone's game.
Translated from the Korean by Anton Hur
I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.
The premise for this is RIDICULOUSLY cool – but the reading experience was just painful. It’s impossible for me to say how much of this is the fault of the translation, but the sentence structure, the way things were worded, just sounded off, the way a song does when you hear it in the wrong pitch. Clunky and weird and nothing like the way people actually speak, which, when a story’s written in first-person, is kind of a problem.
Both the worldbuilding and the info-dumping that conveyed it to us seemed really poorly done to me. If you’re writing an Adult novel about Magical Girls, then you either have to go sarcastic and scathing (which seems like a shame to me) or lean in and embrace the glitter and jewels and over-the-top-ness. A Magical Girl Retires read like it couldn’t decide which it wanted to be – maybe trying for both? There was definitely a strong flavour of apathetic cynicism running through it – see the MC’s ‘wand’ being a credit card – but then we also had different Magical Girl characters being very obliviously perky, and earnestly trying to explain how they needed our main character to save the world, and it was a very oil-and-water situation. Forget not mixing well, they don’t mix at all.
The prose itself, besides having a very jarring rhythm, is very dry, which, again, seems like an odd choice when half the fun of Magical Girls are the costumes and accessories and sparkly superpowers, all of which deserve to be lavishly described. But there was basically no description at all here. Maybe this could be explained away by our MC’s depression – the book opens with her about to commit suicide, and people in the grip of depression generally don’t care much about glitter. But even if that’s the case, it’s a) not clear, when I feel like it could have been explicitly stated that that was why the MC wasn’t vibing with it all, and b) still a very lame reading experience.
And I’m not even going to get into how rushed everything was. It’s not obvious on my ereader, but I think this is quite a short book? If so, it ought to have been longer, giving all the various facets of the story time to shine (and breathe!), giving the reader time to take everything in and process it and form attachments to the characters, etc. As it was, everything’s going at warp-speed, so I had no chance to come to care about anything before the next thing was happening.
I was desperate to get out long before the 25% mark (which was as far as I could make myself go). Sigh. This could have been so great!
Genres: Adult, Fantasy
Representation: Middle Eastern cast and setting
Protagonist Age: 30s/40s?
Published on: 2nd April 2024
ISBN: 1649033648
Goodreads
A stunning debut novel and an impressive feat of storytelling that pulls together mythology, magic, and ancient legend in the gripping story of a mother’s struggle to save her only daughter
Nadine is a jinn tasked with one job: telling the stories of the dead. She rises every morning to gather pomegranate seeds—the souls of the dead—that have fallen during the night. With her daughter Layala at her side, she eats the seeds and tells their stories. Only then can the departed pass through the final gate of death.
But when the seeds stop falling, Nadine knows something is terribly wrong. All her worst fears are confirmed when she is visited by Kamuna, Death herself and ruler of the underworld, who reveals her desire for someone to replace her: it is Layala she wants.
Nadine will do whatever it takes to keep her daughter safe, but Kamuna has little patience and a ruthless drive to get what she has come for. Layala’s fate, meanwhile, hangs in the balance.
Rooted in Middle Eastern mythology, Rania Hanna deftly weaves subtle, yet breathtaking, magic through this vivid and compelling story that has at its heart the universal human desire to, somehow, outmaneuver death.
I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.
This was another case of a first-person voice that did not work for me, and prose that was really blunt and plain when the story itself begged for lush description. Everything about this premise sounded enchanting, but it read like a fruit with all its juice sucked out of it. I don’t know where the magic went.
Also, I’m really tired of stories where the MC has to tell their kid not to stand up for themselves because ‘we can’t draw attention’. Ma’am, you’re a jinn. Everyone seems to know. Why is this a problem, and if it is, why are you living so close to humans at all? Why not move somewhere you and your daughter can be by yourselves, and Layala doesn’t have to be smothered in order to fit in? I didn’t realise that was going to be a part of this book, or I might not have picked it up at all.
I think this has the potential to work for readers who are not as gods-damn picky about their prose as I am? But I couldn’t stand it long enough to even see the story get going properly. Nope.
Did you DNF anything this month?
Leave a Reply