The Spring 2023 Light Novel Guide

The Do-Over Damsel Conquers the Dragon Emperor

What's It About? 

Jill is sentenced to death by the crown prince, her fiancé. But just before she dies, she's sent back in time six years to the party where their engagement had been decided. To avoid this route of ruin, Jill immediately proposes to the person standing behind her…but it's the man who was her greatest enemy, Emperor Hadis?! Jill knows all about his future descent into evil. She quickly retracts the proposal, but the delighted Hadis takes her back to his castle and makes her a meal. Completely won over by the food, Jill makes a life-changing decision…

“I'm going to reform—no, I'm going to make you happy!”

It's time to redo this life with the enemy!

The Do-Over Damsel Conquers the Dragon Emperor has a story by Sarasa Nagase, and art by Mitsuya Fuji. English translation by Jenny Murphy. Cross-Infinite World, $7.99 digital. Available now.

Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

There is one glaring plot point that stands to turn people away from what is either Sarasa Nagase's best-written series, best-translated series, or both: when the heroine Jill returns to her ten-year-old self after dying six years in the future, she begins a romance with a guy who seems a little too excited to be marrying a ten-year-old. Although there's a plot-based explanation for this (comes in at the three-quarter mark), it's almost a case of "too little, too late," especially since Hadis kisses Jill twice in a romantic sense (he's nineteen, for the record). Jill does spend a lot of their interactions both noting that she's internally sixteen and worrying that he's a pedophile, but it's still very off-putting.

It's a shame because if you liked Aileen from Nagase's I'm the Villainess, So I'm Taming the Final Boss, you'll love Jill. She's just the right combination of smart, strong, and ambitious. She also has a knack for commanding respect from nearly everyone she meets. A celebrated military leader in her first go-round, Jill retains those skills with a healthy dose of hindsight, determined to use them to ensure she doesn't end up engaged to a crown prince — who loves his little sister in a very unhealthy way. To that end, she finds herself engaged and married to Hadis, the emperor of a neighboring kingdom. Since Hadis went to war with Jill's homeland (in the future that she already lived and died in), she's invested in making sure that it doesn't happen again and thus decides to stick with him. It would be very sweet if not for the creepy factor, and Jill's direct approach to solving problems she finds is both refreshing in a heroine and fun to read about. The age issue may go away relatively quickly as time marches forward, so if you aren't completely turned off by it here, it may cease to be a problem. But I had a hard time getting past the way it was increasingly in-your-face, which is a shame because otherwise, this is a good story.