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Back to the Small Fishing Village In 1982 Chinese webnovel review – Great until it wasn’t

When you’re reading your slice of life web novel and having a great time and then suddenly the author takes a really bad decision that pisses you off and you drop it but now you’re sad. If you want to experience that, read Back to the Small Fishing Village In 1982.

Summary: Ye Yaodong is a fisherman who falls into the sea in his 50s and wakes up again in his 20s in his fishing village in China in 1982, just like the title said. Having squandered his life and burned all his bridges last time, he decides to live this life a little more sensibly.

And that’s really it. Ye Yaodong isn’t one of those people who go back in time with a system or superpowers or even esoteric knowledge. His memory isn’t even that good, with only major events like his wife’s miscarriage standing out to him. And as an ordinary villager in rural China, he can’t even read until he takes night classes, though he proves to be quick study.

The only thing special about him is his high degree of luck when it comes to fishing. That, and an ability to shmooze. He also knows enough about future events to recognize a pyramid scheme at a time when few have heard of it, and to know that certain things like oyster pearls will go up tremendously in future. This helps him stay out of trouble by working diligently and avoiding standing out too much, while preparing for a prosperous future by making and saving money when he can.

I read up to chapter 77 from a blog that cleaned up the machine translation, but unfortunately the rewrites stopped just when Yaodong had bought a fishing boat and was preparing to become independent from his family. After that I read the brain-melting but still understandable raw machine translation. If you read it, you can look forward to choice lines like, “What kind of mouse meeting last time, didn’t they just not listen to A Dong? You see, they didn’t believe it and didn’t lose. We are too greedy, and the ghosts are obsessed.” It… kind of makes sense in context, but phew!

Not only did the half-garbled nonsense make me appreciate the first blogger, but it also made me think that edited machine translations (a.k.a. post-edited machine translations) are the wave of the future, at least for web novels. But that’s a discussion for another day.

Thanks to the machine translation, me and my surviving brain cells were able to read up to chapter 466 of Back To the Small Fishing Village In 1982 before giving up due to a very disgusting action on the part of Ye Yaodong. Before that, there’s a lot that happens, but for the most part this is a slice of life about a fisherman in a fishing village, so he goes fishing, catches fish, comes back and sells it, rinse and repeat. Whole arcs can revolve around catching spawning squid (sustainability? what’s that?) or picking up scallops on the beach after a typhoon. Here are major events I recall:

In his last life, his wife Lin Xiuqing miscarried a daughter, but this time they are able to hide the baby until it is almost due (barring one person who finds out and tries to blackmail them). Lin Xiuqing goes into labor just when inspectors come round to check, but the villagers are able to delay them until the baby is born. The truly horrifying implication is that she would have been forced to abort the almost full-term baby if she hadn’t given birth right then, which is too cruel to think about but was a reality in China’s draconian one-child policy days.
Ye Yaodong quickly upgrades from his small wooden boat to a mid-sized iron boat. He hires his father as his deckhand and sells (IIRC) the wooden boat to his friends. His two brothers take over the dad’s old boat, and everyone is happy.

Ye Yaodong makes a lot of money through different bursts of luck, such as finding pearls in oysters, picking up and selling a beached oarfish, taking rich men fishing, and finding a reef with plenty of abalone for the picking. He buys a diving suit so he can pick up expensive seafood like sea cucumbers from shallow waters, and comes to a profit-sharing agreement with his friends to let them borrow it.
He also has occasional run-ins with unfriendly people at sea, such as a guy who later incites someone to rob him, and a gang of pirates from Luzhou island. So far he has successfully fended them off every time.
There is a long drawn-out and boring sub-arc where his friend Ah Guang tries to woo his sister Ye Huimei and eventually succeeds. Every reader breathes a sigh of relief once they are finally married and out of the picture.
He successfully mends and improves his relationships with all those who knew him as a ne’er-do-well in his previous life, such as his long-suffering wife, his children, and his in-laws.
For example he goes foraging in the mountains and rivers with his in-laws and helps them make a lot of money, he helps his mother get a job as a village cadre, and he builds an extra room in his new house for his doting grandmother – which indirectly saves his life because she’s around to give him advice during a typhoon.
He saves a whale and gets his picture taken with it.
He picks up a box of treasure while diving and hides it in his garden for the future. He also picks up a tripod that he places in the local Mazu temple, then the government comes sniffing around after it. Long story short, he comes up with an idea to rebuild the temple using donations, and he also makes valuable connections in the army and the government.
He finds out that stores are being sold in a new market that he knows will be prosperous in the future, so he borrows money from his friends and buys two stores without consulting his wife. He later persuades his brothers and some acquaintances to do the same.

This is where the trouble came. He bought it without discussing it with his wife, who keeps the money in the house. When he went to get the money from her to repay his friends, she was understandably upset. So… how does Ye Yaodong persuade her? He doesn’t. He rapes her instead. Uh… yeah. When that fails to persuade her, he tries plan B: rape her again. Which works this time. The writer tries to play it off as nothing, but the magic was gone after that.

I kept reading a little longer and other things happened like Ye Yaodong making tons of money through a squid fishing trip, and picking up boxes dropped by smugglers in the process, or ordering an actual fishing ship at the shipyard (his wife doesn’t bother to oppose him any more, I wonder why) which will be ready in two years.

However, once I lost the will to support Ye Yaodong, I didn’t want to slog through the bad machine translation for his sake any more. I give kudos to the author for making a series about fishing in a Chinese village really interesting and compelling even when he’s just picking up fish on the beach, but maybe try not making him a rapist next time, yeah? I’m done here.

Small Shop Owner in the 60s Chinese webnovel review (spoilers)

You ever read a romance web novel for dozens and dozens of chapters, only for the translations to run out just when the male lead confesses to the protagonist? No? Then you haven’t read Small Shop Owner in the 60s (六十年代小店主), and you’re better off for it.

Summary:

Xu Nannan, the owner of a Taobao shop, wakes up and becomes a rural girl Xu Nannan in the 1960s.

Every day they only eat a wild vegetable chaff dumpling. Working from dawn to night, she carry a hoe and went to the field to exchange for workpoints.

Fortunately, her Taobao shop followed her back to the 1960s, and she was finally able to do some sideline work. (Novelupdates)

I mentioned last time that there wasn’t enough face-slapping in Raising Babies in the 70s, which reduces half of the fun of reading back-to-the-past Chinese novels (of which there are many, many). Usually the setup is for them to introduce truly infuriating family members, neighbors and in-laws, whip up the reader’s outrage and then deliver catharsis in the form of consequences, or verbal/physical beatdowns. It’s a satisfying formula when done right, and indeed the soap opera, dare I say much of entertainment, revolves around unpleasant people getting their due comeuppance.

If that’s what you want, Small Shop Owner in the 60s delivers in copious quantities, slowly ramping up from small infractions to much more serious ones. But at the same time there’s a healthy (?) mix of bad and good people, so it’s not a complete crapsack world where everyone is out to get the female lead and her sister.

For example her immediate family is cold, greedy and scheming, and many of the villagers are indifferent, but the main authority figure is reasonable, there is a kind family that helps them, and when they report serious issues to bigger authories, action is taken swiftly and thoroughly.

In fact, on the balance of things there are more good and helpful people than bad ones. The first people she tries to sell illegal milk powder to turns out to be so honest and friendly that he and his wife even adopt Xu Nannan and her sister. Her first boss loves her so much he takes her under his wing, and almost all of her co-workers love her. She never gets caught or into trouble for black market dealings or buying antiques, and so on and so forth.

However the scumminess, clinginess and sheer persistence of the antagonists, particularly Grandma Xu and the rest of the Xu family, more than make up for the niceness of the other characters. They prevent the series from being too saccharine sweet and ensure that we get regular doses of face-slapping scenes to keep our morale high.

Now, on to the romance. In a change from the usual, Xu Nannan doesn’t magically wake up with a husband, and indeed the male lead (Lin Qingbai) doesn’t show up until like 50 chapters in, maybe more. And neither character instantly falls in love with the other, but rather they start out with a friendliness that develops into something deeper as they keep finding excuses to spend time together.

The male lead Lin Qingbai is not the usual cold, unapproachable face-paralysis kind of guy either. He is a bit distant from the ladies compared to his disgusting playboy brother, but that is appropriate for the times. And he can smile, he can laugh, he has normal emotions, he doesn’t touch her inappropriately, he doesn’t get violently possessive when other guys show interest in her, he doesn’t try to restrict her movements, he doesn’t fantasize about locking her up… man, when did my bar for male leads get so low?

Random picture of couple on bikes because Lin Qingbai woos Xu Nannan by picking her up on his bike.

The main downside is that he smokes. Normal for the times, but really icky. Also the 10-year age gap is off-putting not because of its size but because she’s 17 and he’s 27, and the difference in maturity is a bit much. 27 and 37 would be a-okay. Plus he comes with an annoying family, especially his brother, but then again so does she (and how!).

In all, it’s a healthy and relatively fast-moving romance, which is helped along by the prevailing attitude of the 60s, which held no truck with this “male friend/female friend” stuff. As soon as you guys are seen together more than a few times, everyone starts asking when the wedding is.

And so, after being together for a while, others start asking questions and Xu Nannan tries to put some distance between them. But then she misses him terribly, she runs into him with his family, he introduces her as his “partner” and takes her away. Then he asks… “So do you agree?” … AND THEN THE TRANSLATIONS END BEFORE WE CAN HEAR HER ANSWER!!!! NOOOOOOO! No updates since August 2021 is just too cruel :’-<

I always worry about the translator/site owner in such cases. Anything can happen to any of us at any time, after all. The cause of a sudden translation stop can range from benign or even positive (won the lottery and moved to an island resort) to very bad. Fans can always machine-translate the rest of the series (in fact the “translation” of Small Shop Owner in the 60s is barely-cleaned machine translation anyway) but a life can’t come back. Stay safe, wherever you are.

So as I said in the beginning paragraph, we get a build up to a confession and then nothing unless you want to MTL the rest. Which I can’t be bothered to do because raw MTL hurts my brain. Engines like DeepL have made great progress, but it’s still hard to read. It’s easy to figure out that Xu Nannan and Lin Qingbai will marry and live happily ever after, but what about all the side characters?

From Novelupdates reviews, I learned that Lin Qingsong rapes Xu Hong and gets away with it, and that Xu Nannan’s birth parents get divorced and her mother dies miserably in poverty, but what about everyone else? The Xu grandparents? Liu Qiao and her scheming daughter Xu Meizi? Xu Nannan’s neglected sister Xu Ling? Her mine worker friends? Teacher He? Etc etc. I’m quite curious, but I already decided to put the series behind me, so I’ll just paper that curiosity over with the next series and move on.

I recommend Small Shop Owner in the 60s if you want a balance of characters and drama in your face-slapping novel. Not too crazy, not too boring. Also if you want non-pushy actually kind of decent male leads because the bar is set in hell these days.

Lastly, a word on the “twist” in this series, which is that Xu Nannan has access to her Taobao (think eBay or Amazon) shop and can buy and sell things there. This does not make as much of a difference as you would expect, mainly because a 15 year old girl splashing around large sums of cash would attract all kinds of questions and lead to horrible consequences.

The level of scrutiny and lack of privacy in those days also means she can’t buy or sell anything too modern, or even use such things in her personal life. However the shop does play a role because taking out useful items like milk powder here and there helps her befriend her benefactors, and more importantly keeps her and her sister from starving to death before they finally get out of the Xu family’s clutches.

So if you’re expecting some dramatic business shenanigans with the Taobao shop, nah, at least not at chapter 89 where translations stopped. The female lead doesn’t use her ability to shop from the future to buy history books and find out what’s going to happen next either, though she does stockpile antiques. It’s implied that she’s avoiding standing out too much or rising too high because of the Cultural Revolution that is coming in 1966-76 (I’d find a way to escape to Hong Kong if I were her), but either way she doesn’t do anything too flashy in the chapters I read. Just FYI.

I Just Want to Freeload on Your Luck – chinese web novel review (dropped)

I Just Want to Freeload on Your Luck is one of a sub-genre of Chinese webnovels where there’s a real daughter, who was kidnapped or otherwise went missing, and a fake daughter who was taken in by the original parents, and later on the truth is revealed and all kinds of dramatic hijinks ensue.

There are occasional variations on this, e.g. there’s no fake daughter, or the protagonist is the fake daughter, but usually it all plays out the same way. The family is initially hostile to the “real” daughter because they spent so much time with the fake, but over time she wins them over with her class and demeanor while the lowborn fake exposes her true colors and is eventually kicked out to meet a messy end.

I hate those kinds of stories. Obviously I don’t hate them enough not to read I just want to Freeload on Your Luck, but I do hate it because it’s always poorly done. The original parents always come off very badly because they can never find a way to balance their natural affection for the one they’ve raised all these years with their guilt/feelings for their biological child. It’s always one or the other.

In the end all of the adopted daughter’s failing will be written off as her own bad genes – even if she has been raised from babyhood by those parents, and even if they never saw anything wrong with her behavior until the real one showed up. And meanwhile all the real daughter’s successes and triumphs and good behavior will be credited to her good genes, even if she was raised by wolves 2000 miles away for the first 20 years of her life. It’s so hypocritical, and it really makes me feel bad for the adopted child.

Now, on to the main topic of I just want to Freeload on Your Luck. The real daughter is Zhao Mingxi, the fake one is Zhao Yuan. The gimmick is that Zhao Yuan is super lucky, while Zhao Mingxi is super unlucky and gets even more unlucky the closer she gets to Zhao Yuan. Having died miserably once and been reborn, Mingxi decides to attach herself to lucky characters in the series (except Yuan) to soak up some of their luck (hence the title) and thereby avoid a messy end.

The first half of the story, and the only enjoyable part, is how Mingxi decisively makes a break with the Zhao family that has been treating her poorly for two years. She moves out, cuts all ties and focuses on her studies and getting luck from her seatmate.

The Zhao family is a little pathetic here, because the author strongly implies that Zhao Yuan’s supernatural luck makes it impossible for them to think straight or evaluate matters fairly. It’s only when Mingxi leaves and builds up her luck to an appreciable level that the “spell” is somewhat broken. And then they all begin to turn on Zhao Yuan, which is honestly a little sad because she’s just a kid they all spoiled and doted on for 17 years and suddenly they’re all so cold and hostile to her. It’s not her fault she has that extra luck, and she’s not even aware of it.

It takes about 30 chapters, but the Zhao family eventually gets the hint that Mingxi is well and truly done with them. Well, not really, they still think she will come around eventually but at least they’ve backed off for now. Once the initial source of drama is gone, the story takes a serious downturn to the point where I completely lost interest and dropped it.

Remember when I said Mingxi was absorbing luck from her seatmate? His name is Fu Yangxi, and he somehow gets the idea that Mingxi is in love with him. Then he is heartbroken and depressed to discover she is not and begins to distance himself. Honestly he’s another pitiful character because this is not his fault. Mingxi behaves completely like she has a crush on him, to the extent that an adult male would be fooled, much less a naive, hormone-addled 17-year old. She takes punishment for him, she insists on sitting next to him, she brings him snacks every day, does his homework, worries about him, holds his hand for several minutes, etc.

Unfortunately for him, she barely sees him as human at that point. Her (understandable) goal is to avoid dying of brain cancer at age 23. To that end, she doesn’t care who she hurts or misleads – in fact, it’s not even that deliberate. Do you care about the feelings of your Wifi router? As long as it’s working, you don’t even think about where it is or what it’s doing.

That’s how Mingxi is with Fu Yangxi until he stops “working” and starts avoiding her, then suddenly she starts feeling lonely, following him everywhere, even working her way into his apartment without knowing what the problem is. Meanwhile Fu Yangxi has his panties in a twist because he’s assuming Mingxi was with him to make her old crush jealous, which is absolutely not true but he doesn’t straight up ask her and keeps on assuming. And keeps on running into her and old crush in all kinds of situations which just makes the whole thing worse…

The whole Mingxi-Yangxi thing dragged on so long that I completely lost interest in the series and dropped it. In the first place, I don’t like series where former adults act like kids. Just talk to the boy already! All that beating around the bush is frustrating.

Secondly, I don’t buy Fu Yangxi as the male lead. He’s not a bad guy, but he’s way too immature and has a lot of growing up to do and issues to resolve before he will be a credible romantic partner. Which means either things will end unsatisfactorily or the series will drag on much longer.

Thirdly I’d prefer Zhao Mingxi to focus on her studies and her future like she wanted to instead of getting sidelined with high school romance. 99% of high school romances don’t go anywhere in the long run, and a 23 year-old is old enough to know that.

And so I ended up just dropping I Just Want to Freeload on Your Luck. I’ve read enough, Mingxi has absorbed quite a bit of luck and changed her fate, things are looking up, it’s better to quit while I still have some fondness for the series. I tried to look up ending spoilers but didn’t find any, but I’m sure Zhao Yuan will come to a miserable end and Mingxi and Yangxi will live happily ever after like they always do in these series. The end.

My Fiance is in Love with My Little Sister – Only if you like pointless tragedies!

The past two posts I’ve written have spoken about romances that go nowhere. But it can get worse – you can have a romance that goes nowhere repeatedly. That’s if you’re masochistic enough to read “My Fiance is in Love with My Little Sister” (婚約者は、私の妹に恋をする).

Summary (from novelupdates)

Aah, again? My fiancé was gazing intently at my charming younger sister. When I saw the blaze that lit up in those cold eyes, I was assaulted by deja vu. My fiancé had been in love with my younger sister even in the last life. There was nothing I could do but watch. And, by some karma, I was someone who kept returning to that exact moment.

Right, so, it’s exactly what it says in the title and in the blurb. There’s this lady… and it’s been a long time since I read it so I don’t remember any of their names. Guess I’ll google it. Okay, the lady is Ilya, and nobody can be bothered to mention her fiancé or her sister’s name, so I’ll call them F and S.

Basically Ilya has been reliving her life over and over again from the point where F meets S and falls in love with her. The sad (?) thing is that, despite knowing that F will inevitably fall in love with S, Ilya can’t help loving him or wanting to be his wife. In her early lives, she kicks up a fuss, turns into a villainess and gets dumped/executed/something messed up like that.

In subsequent lives, she tries different things like pretending she doesn’t know about the relationship – but sis dies somehow and everyone thinks she did it. In another life, she attempts to flee the marriage, but gets sold into prostitution and dies an ugly death. After another, she goes mad upon losing her child. In still another… I forget, but either way her attempts to escape from this loop of losing her fiancé to her sister end in failure.

Eventually, after several loops, a mysterious man/crow (Karasu?) shows up. And heavy hints are dropped that her fiancé, at least, is being controlled somehow. In one loop there are several occasions where he feels one way, very fond of Ilya, but is physically unable to say so or act lovingly. It’s like something takes over him and prevents him from doing what he wants. In a sense, he’s a victim of the loop as well. But who set up the endless time loop? Why? How long will it go on? Why is Ilya forced to fall in love with F and F with S?

Welp, don’t think you’re ever going to find out, because My Fiance is in Love with my Little Sister just goes around in circles for ages without ever addressing the key questions. Most likely the author hasn’t a clue so s/he is just buying time while figuring something out. I forget around which chapter finally made me drop it, but eventually the author got tired of Ilya’s story and started writing some nonsensical gibberish about the crow… I think? Either way, there’s only so much glurge and tragedy a person can wade through before they get tired and start wanting either a conclusion or an explanation.

I checked the details on novelupdates and the web novel is still running at 55 chapters with no updates since February 2021. So… you just want a repeated tragedy of Ilya, F and S, and someone getting killed somehow, welp, go ahead. Just don’t expect satisfaction from it. It’s just weepy romantic tragedy. Ilsa simply can’t move on from F, F simply can’t move on from S, so it’s not even one of those “I’ll be happy in my next life!” or “I’ll live a slow life in the countryside!” deals. There’s zero satisfaction or lasting joy to be found in My Fiance is in Love with my Little Sister, so prepare yourself.

Sweet Wife in My Arms (Chinese webnovel) – Gave up at chapter 270 (spoilers)

I don’t remember when it was, but I know I promised myself not to start any webnovel with a ridiculous number of chapters. I told myself I would always check first and not start something that was bound to get tedious and stupid. But time passes, people grow old, we forget our promises and then… we end up reading long-winded dreck like Sweet Wife in My Arms.

Summary: For his sake, she was willing to abandon her career as the best actress and be his wife. With her own network, money and unscrupulous methods, she helped him rise to the top of the world. He, on the other hand, held another woman in his embrace and kicked her away with no mercy. It turned out that all he ever wanted was her rare blood type, her six-month-old child’s cord blood. It was her life…

When she opened her eyes again, she returned to her 20-year-old self. Time repeated and her life rewound. In this life, she would live well. [source: Webnovel]

Now, to be absolutely fair to Sweet Wife in My Arms, the first 250 chapters are a decent and enjoyable read. The female lead Yan Huan is definitely a Mary Sue with perfect acting skills, the most beautiful face ever, amazing wire-fu skills, etc. but that is normal for this kind of series and she’s not obnoxious about it. And unlike many trashy series of this sort, she does not fall back in love with the guy who killed her because it was all a big misunderstanding or something.

In the same way, the male lead Lu Yi is your general icy cold super powerful guy who doesn’t like women at all but somehow there’s something special about the heroine… etc etc. You know the drill if you’ve read even one Chinese romance web novel. Lu Yi is miles and away better than most other CEO/Prince MLs. He’s not rapey, not physically or mentally abusive, not over-the-top protective and doesn’t try to force his way into her life. If anything, she’s the one who starts clinging to him even when he has a girlfriend.

Furthermore, the plot isn’t bad. It has the generic “super talented actress” gimmick romance web novels use when they’re not using “super talented doctor” instead. I like this gimmick better because we get to read about the various cheesy, campy movies and series. Yan Huan takes part in. Which the audience laps up, but they sound sooooo bad. Like this one called “Divorced” about a woman whose husband cheats so she finds another man who doesn’t cheat, happily ever after, after all a woman can’t be happy without clinging to some rich man, haha… And somehow it grosses 600 million yuan and makes her a millionaire, lol.

But that’s the thing about the series early on – it doesn’t take itself very seriously. Despite Yan Huan’s sad past and Lu Yi’s coldness, it’s not a mopey or depressing story. It has its dramatic moments, frustrating ones, funny ones, cute ones. It’s no masterpiece, but it was interesting enough to pass the time. To slowly see Yan Huan overcoming her unfounded fear of Lu Yi, Lu Yi learning to stand up for himself a little, Lu Yi bonding with her cat Little Bean, Yan Huan winning him over with her food, etc. Very cute stuff.

So where did it go wrong with Sweet Wife in My Arms? Around chapter 265, when Yan Huan did something very stupid. I mean she had done stupid things before like meeting a ‘director’ in an apartment alone, but this was extra stupid. Here she remembered that a mudslide occurred in her past life, and Lu Yi was trapped in it. Instead of telling him about it, she decided she would look crazy if she did. So what she did was… she borrowed his car… and went there… and almost got caught in the same landslide.

In other words, instead of potentially avoiding millions of dollars in damage, injury, lives and work hours lost, she wanted to play “little rescue heroine” by showing up with food. Look, I get it, in a NORMAL situation, she might sound crazy for saying she had a dream or premonition about a mudslide. But Lu Yi is the kind of guy who absolutely can and would investigate the area if she so much as hinted at it. He told her as much, whatever she needs him for, he’s willing to do it. There was no need to risk his life, her life, many other people’s lives, just so she wouldn’t look crazy.

But see, that incident in itself wasn’t the dealbreaker for Sweet Wife in My Arms. The problem is that the mudslide broke my immersion, so to speak. I sat up and thought, “This is really dumb. Do I really want to read much more of this?” And THEN, only then, did I check the chapter count. Aieeee, 707 chapters translated to date. Over 2500 chapters in Chinese!! Two thousand five hundred! 2500!! I was only 10% of the way through and I was already shaking my head.

So at that point, I thought, eh, I can’t do this. Let me just read spoilers and see their happy ending and then I’m done. But the spoilers for Sweet Wife in my Arms are hooorrible. The series is craaaap!

Highlights include:

Yan Huan still tangling with Lu Qin, Su Muran and other idiots she dealt with in her past life when a sensible person would move halfway round the world to get away from them,
Lu Yi getting amnesia and getting cuddly with another woman,
Switched identities, the usual miscarriages, triplets…
All kinds of shenanigans revolving around Yan Huan’s extra special blood,
Obligatory Yan Huan in a coma scene, and
Yan Huan going through not one, not two, not three but FOUR rebirth sagas before getting her happy ending

And that’s just the spoilers from the thread. I’m sure there were even more ups and downs, especially revolving around annoying side characters like the gluttonous, uncaring manager Yi Ling and her inevitable romance with Lu Yi’s best buddy Lei Qingyi. To be honest, if the series was, say, 400-500 chapters long, I would have stuck it out regardless of the stupidity of the mudslide incident. But 2500 of this and more? Nope, I’m out. Time is precious in 2021. Gotta read better web novels before COVID clobbers us all.

TL;DR – Sweet Wife in My Arms has a passable premise and very likeable main characters. However it goes on waaaay too long and involves waaaaay too much drama. Unless you have nothing better to do with your time, I advise you to read shorter, more compact and more sensibly plotted series.