The Fall 2024 Light Novel Guide

The Legendary Witch is Reborn as an Oppressed Princess

What's It About? 

The moment her uncle pushed her out of a window but failed to kill her, six-year-old Princess Claudia remembered everything. In her past life, she was a legendary witch who commanded a veritable army of magicians. She possesses a magic that can leave the world at her mercy!

Never mind her cold reception in this life! Claudia decides to live free of worldly worries. She makes a servant of a handsome but unfriendly boy, Noah, and sets out to do whatever she pleases by using the advanced magic that once shook the world, sweeping away her opposition in the process! Unfortunately, using so much power makes her so sleepy… Zzz... Claudia rests easy in the arms of her unwilling servant after using too much magic.

Here begins the story of a legendary witch ready for a comfortable, leisurely life with her grumpy, raven-haired servant!

The Legendary Witch Is Reborn as an Oppressed Princess is written by Tōko Amekawa. English translation by Kashi Kamitoma. Published by J-Novel Heart; PublishDrive edition (October 7, 2024).

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Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

I was going to give this three stars – despite coming from the same author as the excellent 7th Time Loop, this isn't nearly as strong – but one very specific quirk increasingly grated on me as the novel progressed. That issue? Baby talk. Heroine Claudia is often referred to as an eighteen-year-old in a six year old body due to her former life as legendary mage Adelheid. As such, she uses an adult vocabulary. However, because children's bodies are prone to lisping, the text consistently use baby talk pronunciations to show this. Even leaving out debates about speech development and the various issues that can lead to mispronunciation at any age, reading it written out is, as the book might put it, incwedibwy annowing. I believe it was meant to be precious. It does not work.

The other persistent issues are perhaps more familiar, although they still keep this from being as good as the author's other work available in English. For some readers, the entire slave/acolyte contract that Claudia places male lead Noah under will simply be tiresome. When Claudia meets Noah, he's been put under a curse known as a slave contract, which is about to kill him since he's run away. Claudia can't break it in her present state, but she can rewire it so that it links Noah to her while making it so that he's her acolyte rather than her slave. This means he can be far away from her and use her magic as his own, but they're still inextricably bound. Claudia repeatedly offers to break this when she's able, but Noah refuses because he wants to be tied to her. To a degree, this makes sense – he's nine and coming out of a terrible situation. But it also smacks of unsavory views on slavery, with Noah wanting to belong to Claudia and other people repeatedly asking her to give him to them. She does appear to own him, and him being okay with that isn't great, especially with the lengths Amekawa goes to make both children (who are six and nine, I remind you) act like adults. It makes some sense for Claudia. For Noah? Not so much.

It's upsetting because there is a good story underneath all of this. Adelheid's life has become a legend, but to Claudia, it was her life, and she's not sure how she feels about the way people talk about it now. There are also a lot of very intriguing court politics and political machinations, complicated by unethical uses of magic. If the characters were young adults, I think this would be a much better story, because then more of it would make sense in context and there'd be no baby talk. But as it stands, this is a solid foundation with shoddy construction on top.

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Disclosure: Kadokawa World Entertainment (KWE), a wholly owned subsidiary of Kadokawa Corporation, is the majority owner of Anime News Network, LLC. Yen Press, BookWalker Global, and J-Novel Club are subsidiaries of KWE.