Last time on Ascendance of a Bookworm, Motosu Urano is killed in a collapsing heap of books, and reborn as a frail child, named Myne, in a startlingly realistic fantasy world. Her family is poor, and thus without the ability to read, write, and own books. After a number of failed attempts to make some paper, she at least succeeds in making shampoo, and that lands her a job working for a bigshot merchant with her friend (read as: future love interest), Lutz. However, magic is in this world apparently? And Myne is slowly dying of some kind of magic deficiency disease? Wow, that came out of left field.
The story is at least picking up in this volume now that we’ve established all the major aspects of Bookworm. The series gains a Spice and Wolf-y atmosphere in this volume when she has to start negotiating with Benno, her new supervisor, and deal with her first clients. However, the economics course isn’t as… er… dense as it was in Spice and Wolf.
As opposed to volume 1, we have magic properly contextualized during this volume. However, this instance seems like the first real use of traditional isekai tropes. Most magic in isekai- and modern fantasy- is kind of just an excuse to justify having inconsistent world logic (I, for the record, am fine with that as long as the end result is entertaining). The issue with it in Bookworm is that it seems frivolous. Since this world has already been established as perfectly realistic, there’s no need to make a magic system in the first place. So far, the magic in this world is used to do various tasks that could be just as easily accomplished with the actual technology of the time, such as signing a contract. It seems to have been made just to look cool, and for shock value in the case of Myne’s affliction. Speaking of said affliction, it doesn’t take long for Myne to find out about in this volume, due to her meeting with a rich guy’s granddaughter, so Bookworm isn’t going to do one of those dramatic-irony-cringe things this time.
In other news, we get some interesting developments with Myne and Lutz. Lutz actually starts to notice that his friend is not actually the original person, but possessed by someone else. However, it ends up not being as big of a deal as it’s made out to be.
The last thing to note is that the side stories are so far proving to be wholly irrelevant. I never talked about the side stories in the first volume because of this. They show some other POVs outside of Myne, but a lot of them happen out of sequence from the main plot and are confusing, as opposed to Infinite Dendrogram or DanMachi where they actually introduce new, plot-relevant characters and actually effect the main plot. You can read the side stories if you’re really into Bookworm, but otherwise they seem pretty meh.
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Verdict: 7.25/10
Things are picking up now that we’ve established all of the ground rules. However, I still don’t see it as the “end all, be all” isekai. So far, it’s turning out to be a quaint, chill series.
Weeb Revues 