By Kou Yatsuhashi and Mito Nagashiro. Released in Japan as “Ojou Denka wa Ookari no You desu” by Overlap Bunko. Released in North America by Tokyopop. Translated by Katie Kimura.
This is one of those books that’s stacked towards the back, and for the first, oh, three-quarters of it, I was worried we’d have another volume that did not live up to its title. I mean, don’t worry, Leticiel does end up going to town on a bunch of high school bully girls, but that’s still in her standard stoic, unemotional way. Heck, even when she’s in a battle to the death against supposedly long extinct enemies, she’s cool as a cucumber. But thankfully, there’s still her absolutely terrible family to content with, and their actions near the end show that, thank God, Her Royal Highness FINALLY Seems to Be Angry. That said, that rage may end up attracting attention she doesn’t want, as we lose one prince but gain another, and I think I can define him as “intrigued”. But yeah, for the most part in this volume Her Royal Highness is dealing with the traditional enemy of high school girls: exams.
After the events of the last book, the prince, Rocheford, is sequestered at the palace and apparently barely coherent. The King apologizes to Leticiel, and asks what she wants. She’s quick to take advantage of that: she wants 1) her engagement broken, 2) a house where she can live apart from her family, 3) a research lab, and 4) most importantly, access to any book in the kingdom. She gets all this but the last – she can’t see the forbidden archive, but otherwise everything is good. (The book strongly implies the answers she needs are in the forbidden archive.) So now she’s on her own (with her maid and butler, of course), and ready to go back to avoiding classes, though she does take the time to help an abused young classmate with “too much magic” disease from being bullied. Unfortunately, just because she gets away from her terrible mother doesn’t mean she stops being terrible…
The most intriguing part of the book is Drossell, who is not quite as dead as I may have thought after reading Book 1. We get a little more information about her in this book, partly as Leticiel has started to have memory flashes of her “Drossell” life, which mostly include playing with a young boy named Alec. More intriguing are the POV chapters from her twin sister Christa, where we hear more about what broke their relationship, why Christa started to get fanatically jealous of her, and what happened to Alec. It’s interesting because it definitely implies that Leticiel is going to have to make piece with her Drossell body, but also as it appears that one reason everyone’s sort of OK with her complete personality change is that this is the SECOND time it’s happened. I had assumed Christa was going to be the traditional evil sibling in this series, but I now suspect that getting these two to make up may be one of the big goals.
I am sincerely hoping the third volume does not get delayed a year, as it’s hard when they’re so far apart to remember everything. Still, a decent read, and I think it only runs to 5 books, so not a huge money sink.
