What's It About?

Every internet novel has the usual cast: a gorgeous heroine, handsome boys vying for her attention, and a unremarkable best friend at the heroine's side. Dani, an ordinary student and avid reader, is all too familiar with these tropes. But she never imagined that one day she'd wake up in one herself!

But how did she get here?

Her new fictional world is complete with a beautiful best friend named Yeoryung, and four impossibly good-looking boys who all happen to be in her class...and are possibly love interests. Love interests that weren't originally meant for her.

Dani knows that nothing good will happen to her as the side character, so she is determined to stay out of the way! But what happens when this fictional world ends up leading Dani to the first real friends she's ever known? With no idea how to get back home, Dani decides she'll just have to play her part—no matter what plot twists come her way.

My Life as an Internet Novel has story and art by A Hyeon and Yu Hanryeo. Translation by Ciel. Published by Inklore (October 14, 2025). Rated T.

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Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

One of my favorite lines in any movie is when, in Galaxy Quest, a side character asks the main characters if they've ever seen their own show. It seems to perfectly sum up the situation so many genre fiction characters end up in: blithely wandering along through a trope-laden story with no apparent clue as to where the predictable plot is taking them. Not so Dani: when her first day of middle school starts looking suspiciously like a cheesy internet novel, she's immediately suspicious. Who is this gorgeous, heroine-looking girl who claims they're best friends? What's with the embarrassing name of this middle school that is emphatically not the one Dani tested for? Why the hell does everyone refer to a group of hot boys as “The Four Heavenly Kings” like it's a thing normal people say? It all points to one thing: Dani has been somehow transported into a web novel.

Series creators A Hyeon and Yu Han-ryeo clearly know what they're working with here. Even if you've only sampled Japanese light novels or K-dramas, the sort of book Dani's currently living is immediately recognizable. From the way people look to how they talk, everything just screams “tropey YA or NA fiction,” particularly the reverse harem aspects. Dani tries her best to avoid the plot, but eventually has to give in to part of it because she just feels so badly for Yeoryeong, the girl who's purportedly been her best friend since infancy. As Dani realizes, Yeoryeong doesn't know that this is a book or that Dani's been migrated into it. As far as she knows, her best friend suddenly started acting cold and weird, and that really hurts. By accepting Yeoryeong, Dani's not only bowing to the demands of the story, though – she's starting to see the characters as real people, and that's a key component of many an isekai tale. Whether she likes it or not, Dani's beginning to accept her fate.

Whether or not that includes the romance plots, however, remains to be seen. She still thinks Yeoryeong is the heroine, but all four hot guys have other ideas…and so does Yeoryeong, honestly, who's not about to let a boy take her girl away from her. There are some definite pacing issues here, with the jump between middle and high school feeling very abrupt; this may be on purpose to mimic a time skip in a novel, but it still doesn't quite work as written. But this is a clever and entertaining parody for all of us who can't seem to stop reading cheesy fiction, and while I hope the pacing evens out, I'm also in this for the long haul.

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Bolts
Rating:

Look at that, it's another story about someone being trapped in a light novel where they have to deal with all of the uncomfortable tropes that come with that type of story! I have never seen this before! OK, I won't be too sassy because there are a few things that this book does do right. However, it is a little bit buried under the rather slow pacing and baffling narrative decisions found in the second half. The setup isn't unfamiliar, and normally, the main focus of these stories is either the comedic angle or the unique ways that the protagonist will try to navigate around conventional scenarios. This definitely isn't a comedy, and I'm surprised at how dramatic a lot of the story actually is. In some ways, that's refreshing because the book gets into a little bit of how messed up it would be to suddenly wake up in an alternate world where everyone has this inferred history with you that you just don't remember. Suddenly, you're at a different school, have a best friend you have no memory of, and are pulled into romantic situations that you did not ask for.

Probably my favorite part about this book was the beginning, because there was that internal struggle with trying to separate from the tropes of the story versus seeing all of these new people as actual characters. I like the internal dilemma that Dani goes through and the conclusion that she arrives at. That's a pretty solid and surprisingly unique setup for this type of story. But then we get a random time skip in the middle, and it feels like I'm reading a completely different story. It's so strange that the story starts with this idea that our protagonist doesn't know much about the story's history, but then suddenly throws in a narrative that makes it so we do not know a lot of the character's history.

That's a problem because suddenly we are no longer in the headspace of our main character, who does actually get to live through a significant amount of time in the story, but we don't get to see it. Yes, the story does flashback to a lot of those points we missed, but this just randomly makes the narrative feel extremely uneven. It almost feels like I'm suddenly being tricked with what I'm seeing, but the story is no longer playing it as tongue-in-cheek or as thoughtful as it did during the first half. I could recommend half of this book to somebody familiar with the genre, but outside of that, I really question the creative decision to take such a bizarre and radical left turn. In a lot of ways, it feels like I was reading a book that was split in half by two writers, but I like what the first writer wrote way more than what I saw from the second.