From the Bookshelf: Anything but Average.

I’m always on the lookout for fresh, new series to keep me entertained. And when I find one that fits the bill, I just can’t help but read right on through to the end. Unfortunately, when the series only has one book in english, it’s a bit difficult to actually binge read… and such was the case when I discovered a light novel series called Didn’t I Say To Make My Abilities Average In The Next Life?!

Known as Abili Average, (probably because the name is actually a paragraph,) the series follows Adele von Ascham, a young girl born into the noble Ascham family. On her 10th birthday, she recovers her memories of being Kurihara Misato, a girl from Japan who died shortly after her high-school graduation, trying to save a little girl from the mysterious killer isekai truck. She had been known as a genius in Japan, and when God confronted her about reincarnation, she asked him one simple thing… “please make me an average girl.”

Unfortunately for Adele, God’s interpretation of that was… somewhat flawed, to say the least. She was nobility, but lower nobility, right in the middle between the top and bottom social classes. Her looks were average… for the nobility. Her magical ability was average… of all the creatures on the planet, her abilities sat right in the middle. The same went for her physical abilities, sitting right in between an insect and an Elder Dragon.

… Are you beginning to see the problem?

Yeah, while her abilities were average compared to other creatures on the planet, compared to normal humans, she was, in essence… a monster. The only thing less than average about her was her total social denseness, getting her into all sorts of trouble.

While the Isekai genre has certainly been running thin lately, I found this one to be enjoyable. Adele is a great female lead for the series, and it’s really nice to see the social denseness from a female character for once. Not only is she completely oblivious to the social repercussions of her actions, she’s also pretty incapable of hiding her incredible abilities from her friends and peers.

The translations aren’t perfect, so there’s some grammatical errors, but the majority of the novel was quite well-written. It was engaging and I read the whole thing through in a single day. It never goes too deep into emotional character moments, focusing mostly on the lighter, more comedic and crazy things that she goes through, so if you want a hard emotional and character-driven story, i’d look at Grimgar or Overlord instead.

If you’re looking for some laughs and some nice soda-pop and cotton fluff Isekai goodness though, I would highly recommend this series. It’s a nice, short read, it’s pretty funny, the characters are interesting, and the action is just nonstop with very few low points.

If you’ve read this series already, do you share my opinion of it? If you haven’t, I hope you give it a try! Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you all in the next post!