James Nicoll Reviews

Adopted Daughter of an Archduke Volume 2 is the second volume in the third series (the ninth volume overall) in Miya Kazuki’s Ascendance of a Bookworm secondary-universe bibliophile fantasy and Isekai light novel series. Adopted Daughter of an Archduke Volume 2 was illustrated by You Shiina and translated by Quof.

Demonstrating a superlative ability to fail upwards, various missteps have elevated Myne from an otherworldly spirit possessing the body of peasant’s daughter¹ to the adopted daughter of an Ehrenfest Duke to a newly appointed High Bishop. Myne is learning on the job.

Ehrenfest is very different from Myne’s native Japan. In addition to its rigid social stratification, Ehrenfest is pre-industrial and comparatively poor. Many of its social conventions are abhorrent to Myne. But as Myne has discovered on a number of occasions, Ehrenfest has no desire to conform to the expectations of an otherworldly immigrant.

Take the matter of orphans. Children who find themselves without family protection are, if lucky, raised in orphanages. These are poorly funded and their charges are property of the state. Lucky orphans end up working for temples. Unlucky orphans die of disease or starvation, or are sold for various unsavory purposes to wealthy people.

Myne has appropriated a number of orphans for her various projects, a hobby greatly facilitated by her status as High Bishop. Touring the countryside as part of her duties, Myne examines and selects more orphans, this time from the town of Hasse. The mayor of Hasse had set aside two pretty orphans for sale to an aristocrat. Myne does not hesitate to appropriate those as well.

As Myne’s terrifying mentor Ferdinand explains, Myne is in the wrong. The mayor was within his right to sell the two girls and by saving them, Myne has cost Hasse valuable income and inflamed the ire of Hasse. Handled badly, this could lead to an uprising.

There is an easy solution. All Myne needs to do is isolate the mayor from his aristocratic supporters and then find a pretext to murder him. It’s perfectly obvious, but not to someone who grew up in modern Japan.

Another crisis looms, also driven by good intentions. The custom is for aristocrats to have many children so that the kids can be set against each other. The winner of the ensuing struggle inherits the family title, thus ensuring that titles are held by motivated, skilled people.

Myne’s adopted father Duke Sylvester hated competing against his siblings. To spare the next generation the trauma he experienced. Sylvester designated his young son Wilfried the official heir. What a benevolent father Sylvester is!

What Sylvester did not foresee was that Wilfried would be terribly lazy. Nor did it occur to the Duke that his son would be spoiled by servants well aware that any discipline applied to Wilfried now might be repaid by a vindictive Duke Wilfried. Result: Wilfried is an illiterate incompetent and incapable of performing the duties on which the well-being of his subjects will depend.

The obvious solution is to throw the useless boy off a convenient tower or into a deep lake. However, perhaps it’s not too late to salvage the child.

~oOo~

My only qualm about this series is whether the challenge of the ebook’s prodigious file size (a couple of dozen times the size of a text-only epub) is more bothersome than finding enough shelf-space for a thirty-three-volume light novel series.

The flaw in the aristocratic inheritance system is that it selects for homicidal competitiveness. Thus far, this is has worked out in Myne’s favor. Shortly before her arrival, a dispute greatly reduced the number of aristocrats. As the aristocracy conducts certain vital magical rites, and as Myne has a prodigious amount of mana, she is too valuable to murder for being an ignorant, book-obsessed, interfering busybody.

At least so far.

Readers familiar with the series may notice parallels between Wilfried and Myne. Both would prefer to focus on the activities they enjoy, while ignoring and avoiding the boring stuff. In Myne’s case, her obsession is reading. To her credit, she can learn, but only if Ferdinand keeps reminding her that the boring stuff matters². Which can be a bit boring, so I skip over it. I keep reading because Myne is an endearing knucklehead and her adventures are amusing.

Adopted Daughter of an Archduke Volume 2 is available here (Amazon US), here (Amazon Canada), here (Amazon UK), here (Apple Books), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Chapters-Indigo), and here (Words Worth Books).

1: Backstory: the soul that ended up in Myne’s recently vacated body is that of a young Japanese bookworm who, having narrowly avoided being struck by Truck-kun, was crushed to death by a toppling bookcase. Since waking in her new body, Myne has been using the skills acquired as an easily-bored bookworm in an effort to transform her adopted society into one with a thriving book trade. That way she can have something to read.

2: I can no longer remember how long it took Myne to notice that magic is real, not a mere local superstition. More than one volume, I think, in a society governed by magic. I said she was a knucklehead.