The Fall 2023 Light Novel Guide

Days with My Stepsister

What's It About? 

After his father remarries, Yuuta suddenly finds himself with a new stepsister: Saki, the greatest beauty at school. Neither of them is sure how to act around the other at first, but the two gradually grow more comfortable living together. Slowly, cautiously, patiently, two strangers become more. So begins an unlikely love story.

Days With My Stepsister has a story by Ghost Mikawa and illustrations by Hiten. English translation is done by Eriko Sugita. Published by Yen On (October 17, 2023).

Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

Were I in a more cynical state of mind, I would blame this book's mediocrity on being based on a YouTube serial. While the YouTube-to-novel pipeline is sparsely populated, I don't think that's the issue here. Instead, Days With My Stepsister seems to be in the awkward position of wanting to have its cake and eat it too, resulting in a story that seeks to both thumb its nose at genre tropes while also embracing them and indulging in a few truly uncomfortable moments. The book opens with male protagonist Asamura telling us that the dream of falling in love with your stepsister (and her with you) is strictly the product of light novels and manga fantasies; at first, this feels like good news. But as the novel wears on, it becomes increasingly clear that he and his new same-age stepsister, Ayase, are, going to fall for each other, culminating in the awful moment where she asks him to buy her body. He refuses, but between that, his observations on her appearance, and the usual stupidity about doing a load of laundry that might (gasp) contain both his and her underwear, any hopes of tongue-in-cheek commentary or a healthy story about a blended family go down the drain.

It's also a little awkward that only Asamura seems to be making any effort to see Ayase as a sibling. The parents, as is the norm in this sort of story, are the sort of morons who forget to tell their teenage children that they're remarrying someone with a child of the same age until the morning of, so they're barely a factor at all. Ayase is struggling with something emotional in her life, but we don't get quite enough information about it to form a clear picture of why she might be acting as she does, and the epilogue in the form of her diary doesn't do anything to help with that. She seems to struggle with social cues, and her comment that she cultivates her pseudo-gyaru look as “armor” does hint at something else going on, but it's not enough to take the ick out of some of her actions. The writing itself is very readable, which is a plus, and the slice-of-life feel works well if you take out the more unsettling story elements. But it fails to really either embrace or refute its genre, landing it in a place that's hard to define unless it's to say, “This book doesn't quite work.”