Tearmoon Empire Vol. 2 LN Review

The selfish princess continues to thrive.

It’s school break time for Princess Mia, but between her duties as a member of the royal family and her need to continue the machinations meant to save her head, there’s little rest to be had. Mia’s future diary still predicts doom, so her laziness will have to wait; there are grain deals to be made and peaceful solutions to territorial disputes and would-be revolutions to be grabbed at. There is also a gentleman love Mia must ensure makes it to his own adulthood, as it turns out that her efforts to save her skin have resulted in endangerment to her adored Prince Abel. It’s all an awful lot of work for someone like Mia, so it’s a good thing everyone around her is deluded enough about her true nature that she can largely get them to help her achieve her own ends. That she manages to cap a largely triumphant volume with a likely ill-advised snubbing of a noble tea party is Mia at her most Mia.

As much as I enjoyed the first volume of Tearmoon Empire, the story overall absolutely ups its game here, particularly regarding political intrigue, although I wish it was willing to give Mia a little more credit than Mia is willing to grant herself. Mia is very much dedicated to avoiding a repeat date with the guillotine, but its also become clear that even if she doesn’t always do a great job with planning the details, she’s got the wherewithal to ensure she’s got the right people on hand to assume she has and carry it out anyway. And Mia, somewhat grudgingly, admits toward the end of the volume that she’s come to truly care about the people around her, many of whom were involved in her demise in her first time through life. It’s a shock for someone who is happily dedicated to the idea of herself as a selfish person.

But while this is a story primarily about its heroine’s growth as a person, the glimpse we get of Prince Sion’s own growth this volume is pretty intriguing, as he’s forced to come face-to-face with the fact that his sense of justice and righteousness may be as much about his own ego as it is about a genuine desire to do good. Tied in with this is a more general idea about second chances and forgiveness, and of people having the graciousness to allow others to have them.

I mentioned in my review of the first volume that I thought translator and editor David Teng and Hannah N. Carter made for a good team, and that’s still the case here. It isn’t unusual, it seems, for J-Novel Club to swap out translators mid-series, so I am hoping that will not prove the case here.

I am avidly looking forward to the third volume, and also hoping fervently that it won’t be as long a wait as it was between the first and second volumes. There’s still some intrigue that hasn’t been entirely solved, and I am eager to spend more time with Mia and her cohort. I am also curious to see how things shake out with the nobles Mia irks at the end of the book, as I can’t imagine they’ll settle down easily after their tooth-gnashing.