Review of A Magical Girl Retires by Park Seolyeon

*A Magical Girl Retires* by Park Seolyeon, translated by Anton Hur (2022). Published by HaperVia.

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

Running a book blog and reading almost two hundred books a year (I’ve done this almost every year of my life—it’s been a fascinating trend, even when I’ve been too busy to exist outside of life and work), I tend to know what kind of books I like. I’m also very intentional in analyzing the trends of what I’m reading, as I’m genuinely committed to diversifying the books I pick up and see new perspectives.

As a blogger and a professional writer/editor myself, a place I have always advocated for is the library. I was born and raised in the United States, and while not everyone has access to an incredible library system like we do, I’ve come to realize that Americans take for granted what their local libraries can provide for them. There are countries where people literally do not have access to books, but we have these free places where we can check them out for free along with movies and so many other goodies.

It’s like a wonderland for me, and I go to my local library often. I try to support them as well as much as I can, especially considering how library systems here in the US are increasingly coming under threat. People don’t want nice things it seems. I get a lot of my books from the library because of my limited budget and the fact, at the time of writing this, I was preparing to start a full time job after a lengthy time of being unemployed. I like to request the new releases, wander in the new fiction section after I pick up my requests, then head into the stacks to see what I can find that catches my eye this time.

This blog post comes from a book I requested: A Magical Girl Retires. I’ve been meaning to read this, but have been majorly procrastinating ever since it came out a while back. I brought this book to New York City with me, during a work trip, and I ended up reading it one morning when I wake up at 6 AM. It’s not too long, so you can get through it fairly quickly.

Let’s get to the review! I can see this introduction is getting a little long.

A depressed 29-year-old finds herself roped into the world of magical girls despite her doubt.

Our main character in this novel, no matter how brief it is, is in quite the pickle at the beginning of the book. She’s 29-years-old and depressed because of her life circumstances. She can’t find a job after the COVID-19 pandemic, as she lost hers, and now she’s an incredible amount of credit card debt that she might never find herself out of.

That’s what leads her to a tragic decision: she’s going to kill herself by jumping off of the Mapo Bridge in Seoul. She prepares to do so, but when she’s actually on the bridge and tries to jump, someone stops her. Meet: Ah Roa. She’s a magical girl with the ability to see the future, and she believes our protagonist might be the most magical girl.

Side note: in the world of this novel, the magical girls are women who have abilities and use them for the good of the world. They’re pretty well-known and not a secret society, so people know who they are and don’t panic when someone has a magical skill in front of them.

Our protagonist doubts what’s Roa is saying to her, even though Roa is convinced she is the magical girl of time due to her visions. The biggest change they’re debating right now is the major problem of climate change, and the magical girl of time is someone who should be able to stop it. There’s an entire theory baked into the novel with this, which you’ll see if you read it.

But when Roa is proven wrong, our protagonist has to unlock something within herself anyways to help the magical girls with a new threat: the actual magical girl of time who’s gone rogue. While our protagonist might not be the actual magical girl of time, fate has different plans for her, and she’s going to help the magical girls before it’s too late.

There’s some pretty queer subtext going on throughout this novel, but I’m not going to put a label on it because I’m not sure if I was hallucinating this or not. I kept rereading certain phrases and passages because I just wasn’t sure if I was projecting onto this story or not.

Anyways: this unfolds in a pretty fun way, and it kind of feels like a rushed anime at times. Which is fine, but we’ll discuss some of the problems with this below.

Overall Thoughts

As I wrote before, this is such a fun novel. I was getting into the concepts it was introducing, and it felt like a fairly unique fantasy in the way it addresses class, environment, and how magic can actually make the world around us a better place. I don’t read a ton of fantasy, but am familiar with its tropes, so this does subvert quite a bit of expectations.

However, it was too short. This feels like it shouldn’t have been a novel maybe, but a series. That is an expectation of fantasy, so yes, while this is subverting that, I did find this simply too much rushed from plot point to plot point. I wanted it to take its time more when it didn’t.

The actual writing is fine, and so are the characters (minus the fact we don’t really get to know them). Anton Hur does a great job with most of his translations, so the prose in this feels smooth and accessible. You tend to notice when translations are awkward or janky; this went so smoothly I forgot it was a Korean novel.

I say pick this one up if you’re interested, but don’t have high expectations. It would really work as an animated series—I would watch this for sure.

Follow me below on Instagram, Goodreads, and Letterboxd for more.