Review: A Small Town in Southern Illvaria – acaswell

In the middle of this book, I suddenly realized that I’d never actually read any LitRPG before. I’d read manga/manhwa/light novels involving leveling and systems and that sort of thing, but not anything that I think would technically be classified as LitRPG. I get the feeling that this is not your usual sort of book in that category but the plot was right up my alley.

In classic isekai fashion, Alice goes from falling asleep in her bedroom to waking up in a strange place that is almost-but-not-quite Earth. And almost equally startling, there seems to be some sort of System with stats and perks and achievements. Basically, Alice has become an RPG character, though unfortunately a very unprepared one plopped in the middle of nowhere in her pajamas. But as Alice learns to survive in her new world, she also learns more about the System and how it works which leads to even more questions. The people there view the System as a god, but is it even sentient? Why do some things work in her world but not here? And most importantly, how can she go home again?

“I think I might have just accidentally broken one of my really big assumptions about how mana works, and I might need to revise some things.”
“Isn’t that usually grounds for realizing you’re on to something big?”

I was pretty much predisposed to like this book. C’mon, it’s about a nerdy girl scientist in a fantasy world! She can do magic! Mostly magic that helps her research more things! And her research item of choice is how the System works! It’s a pretty cool idea and something I found very fascinating. Alice has a lot of predisposed ideas about how the system should work and is pretty great at figuring out experiments to test those ideas, even when she doesn’t have much of anything to test with. As her experiments get more and more complicated, I really enjoyed everything she discovered about the System – especially the things that threw her for a loop. This was my favorite part of the book and it was exactly what it said on the tin – a budding scientist in a fantasy world!

As for the other parts of the book, well. There’s also some pretty decent world building. The structure of how society would work when everyone has access to a status screen and leveling up is handled well (and also interesting!). The book is mainly restricted to the titular small town and its environs so while we only get a broad overview of politics and geography, it worked well enough for me.

Besides Alice, I liked that several of the other major characters were also women. Lady Illa, the town’s founder and the mage who basically takes Alice under her wing, is pretty badass, while Cecilia, the town’s sole enchanter, is around Alice’s age and closer to a friend for her. They did occasionally feel a bit flat to me, though, but Alice also had a very pragmatic view of everything. Surprisingly enough, given the well-written female characters, the author is a man.

And then there’s the elephant in the room. This book is long, absolutely, ridiculously long. It blows the pacing to smithereens. The beginning is especially affected to the point where I gave up on the book twice before I finally got hooked enough to finish it.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s nice to not have the main character suddenly become super-OP. Alice has to struggle through a lot upon her arrival and as she makes her way through the new world. But at some point, there’s such a thing as just too much struggling. Over a quarter of a book (130+ pages in the Kindle version) goes by before she finally arrives at that small town in the title.

That’s not to say that things don’t happen before that, but it just goes to show that there’s too much of everything. Yes, I want to know what perks she chooses and how they affect her, but does it really matter if she’s regenerating 2.5% or 2.7% of her maximum mana per hour? I like that it’s slice-of-life but there’s so many scenes included that felt like they could’ve been summarized in a few sentences without affecting the character development. There’s also a lot of unnecessary repetition in some of her thinking, where she rehashes some of her previous theories or experiments repeatedly. Yes, Alice, I know this happened like 100 pages ago but I don’t need a full page summary of it! I felt like the book ended at a good point with plenty of plot points left to explore in the next book.

Overall, while I enjoyed the essential bits of the novel, I struggled a lot with the length and felt that it didn’t do a great job of keeping my interest. While I will likely be picking up the next book (if it’s in Kindle Unlimited), it’s hard for me to recommend this unless scientist! studying! magic! is also your jam. But if it is… hop into your PJs and maybe grab some crab legs (you’ll see why) and start reading this book.

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