The Fall 2023 Light Novel Guide

My Magical Career at Court

What's It About? 

Magic is everything to Noelle. She loves it so much that she puts up with her horrible job at the Mages' Guild to practice it. The hours are long, the pay is rock-bottom, and the boss is a nightmare! But as long as she has magic, she can withstand the hardships. At least, until the day she hears these dreaded words:“You're fired.” Noelle's hometown in the outskirts of the kingdom doesn't offer many alternatives for a career in magic—especially now that she's been blacklisted from guild work! Just when it seems like all hope is lost, Noelle's old friend Luke shows up to give her an opportunity she never could have imagined: a job as a royal court magician. Now Noelle is living the dream, rubbing shoulders with the kingdom's greatest magicians and showing off her skills. She has a beautiful new workplace and a generous new boss, but how will she cope with intense entrance exams, her marriage-obsessed mother, and the rules of etiquette? What awaits Noelle in her magical new career?

My Magical Career at Court has a story by Shusui Hazuki and art by necömi. English translation by Mari Koch, and editing by Carly Smith. Published by J-Novel Heart (September 20, 2023).

Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

Noelle is the sort of heroine who is perhaps best described as “Katarina-esque.” She's gung-ho about the things she loves, attracts people like a picnic does ants, and has a wall of emotional density forty feet thick. She's not precisely stupid, but she definitely has moments where she feels like what romance readers call “TSTL,” or “too stupid to live.” But rather than the heroine of a reverse harem story, Noelle is the star of a tale of a young woman in love with magic who has been beaten down to the point where she doesn't believe that she's any good at it, despite the reverse being true. It's a bit of a contradiction in terms, but the book largely makes it work, if only because Noelle is a bull in the china shop of life. All of her more foolish moments stem from the combination of her being utterly devoted to her craft but thinking she's without much talent. She charges into situations with the firm belief that she can't succeed, but the determination to try anyway.

As you might imagine, this makes her alternately very frustrating to read about and a fun character to follow. That appears to be how most of the other characters in the book feel about her too – they're fascinated by her contradictions. Only Luke, her friend from magic school, is in love with her at this point, which helps to keep the book from feeling too derivative. Also interesting is the way that the story uses character voices – both Luke and Noelle get first-person narration, but we also get several third-person sections for other characters' perspectives, including the two men whose workplace abuse convinced Noelle that she was a failure of a mage. This is particularly worth noting since the author's afterword discusses how the book is based around a theme of “yearning,” because the three points of view we get the most of all do fit that – Noelle yearns for magic mastery, Luke yearns for Noelle, and the two closest things we get to villains yearn for an easy life, built on the backs of exploited workers, of course. The writing isn't brilliant and does sometimes veer off into repetitive sections, while Noelle seems to undergo a weird personality change every time she has to get dressed up, suddenly evincing a need to be sexy that isn't present anywhere else in the text. But it's a fun series opener despite these things, and the ending does a good job of making you want to know what happens next.