Tags: Comedy, Fantasy, Drama, Slice of Life, Josei, Villainess

The Lion, The Witch and the Absolute Audacity of this Villainess!

(This review will contain spoilers)

J-Novel Club have been killing it recently with some of the villainess novels they’ve announced over the past year. Prison Life is Easy for a Villainess, is one of their titles from the latest round of licensing announcements and its easy for me to say that their streak remains unbroken when it comes to their great villainess titles!

Starting as any novel in the villainess sub-genre would, the titular villainess, Rachel, has come face to face with an engagement annulment/condemnation event at the hands of Prince Elliott. This, is where things derail in every possible way leading to some of the funniest scenes that I’ve come across in light novels so far. As it turns out, Rachel, is a legitimate psychopath with the only thing keeping her in line was the necessity of keeping up appearances as the Crown Prince’s fiancée. Now, with the help of her secret underground organisation, she can finally live a life of hedonistic relaxation whilst annoying the ever living hell out of her captures, all from the safety of her prison cell.

Rachel can be a real terror at times (understatement of the year!), she really will do anything in order to ensure her life of luxury, much to the chagrin of the Prince and his motley crew who are really trying (and failing) to punish her. These start with small things at first, lots of canned food and some furnishings to make the cell comfortable and quickly snowballs from there. Suddenly, we start to see a nice fancy bed being added to the cell, art supplies and a mural, then we move to bigger things from holding a barbecue and an entire party in the prison to managing to swap places with her most trusted maid in order to have a sleepover with friends and see a play. All the while, the Prince and his crew are being lead around by the nose trying to figure out how Rachel is able to pull all of this off. This is all done to great comedic effect, its always wonderful to read these insane escapades whilst Rachel thinks of these actions as the most normal thing in the entire world. I still can’t get over how she just planned an escape to see a play and to have a sleepover trusting everything to her maid Anne, who’s skills are great but just don’t come up to Rachel’s level leading to a number of problems for the females of noble society that could have hilarious implications for years to come.

Rachel’s actions do not merely stretch towards ensuring her own lavish lifestyle, as she still has an interest in pulling her more questionable “pranks” and getting her own style of revenge. Her pranks do cause some hilarious mayhem as well as cause the untimely death of a nobles’ prized duck. A truly unfortunate victim of her merry whims. Her revenge for the Prince and is crew follows more along the lines of causing their downfall and teaching their naïve selves on how the world actually works. In the first volume, we can already see the troubles that the Prince is having with his workload and high society life and how Margaret is a prime target for Rachel as her own personal punching bag. However, it is the villainess’ brother George who has to face the brunt of her schemes by the end of this volume. As it turns out, George has many embarrassing secrets and certain unhealthy obsessions about his sister. To make matters worse, this is revealed whilst his fiancée, Alexandra, is waiting in the shadows. Looks like he’ll have to step back in line and into his sisters and his fiancée’s good books in order for his world not to be turned upside down.

Rachel’s character is possibly one of the biggest selling points of the light novel. She’s equal parts psychotic and intelligent, which has lead to her being the defacto strongest noble within the country perhaps even more so that the royalty themselves. In order to get everything she has ever wanted and to ensure her plans always succeed, she even created her own secret organisation known as the “Black Cats” who are almost exactly like the secret governments you hear about in conspiracy theories. They are literally everywhere and hold high positions in not only her own countries government but also foreign countries as well. The Prince and his faction have an important role to play as well, they are all in their own ways naïve and haven’t quite worked out the horrors that await them beyond their own close circle of friends and allies. It’ll be interesting to see what types of revenge Rachel has in store for them over the course of the next volume.

To really add depth to the story, the author, Hibiki Yamazaki, has gone out of their way in order to build the world around the characters. Beyond the main cast, we as readers get to experience Rachel’s actions from some of the characters on the outside e.g., her parents and the King and Queen. They know exactly what she’s like and what actions she’ll likely take and have chosen the sanest approach – run away as far as possible and wait for everything to blow over. There are also quite a few flashback sequences thrown in to show just how much of a terror Rachel can be. Most of these incidents have cause extreme ptsd and amnesiac effects on their victims, from the Prince unable to remember Rachel trying her damnedest to kill him to all the traumatic experiences that George has had to put up with. Rachel has been and always will be an unrelenting psychopath!

Prison Life is Easy for a Villainess, is a fantastic comedic play upon the villainess sub-genre. Brimming with great characters and believable yet audacious acts, it’ll leave readers rolling around with laughter as you wonder what exactly will Rachel do next? I really enjoyed this volume and am truly looking forward to seeing just how things develop in the final volume whose prepub will likely start in the next couple of weeks.

The prepub for this series is currently available to read via a subscription on J-Novel Club. The first volume of the series will be officially released on February 23rd.