romance Archives - Page 4 of 12

False Confession – Promising series that went nowhere

False Confession (잘못된 고백), now sadly(?) on hiatus, is a romance manhwa that promised much from the start but didn’t go anywhere except hiatus in 45 chapters. I honestly feel like I wasted my time reading the whole of Season 1, but maybe Season 2 will finally have the story/awkward romance we were all expecting when we picked it up.

Summary (from the Tappytoon official site)
“I think I’ve fallen for you.” With a single drunken confession, Renesha’s plans to live a comfortable and uneventful life were shattered. Somehow she confessed her love to the wrong man: the Grim Reaper of the Battlefield, Duke Cavert Willard! It’s the worst thing to happen to her since she woke up in this fantasy universe and discovered her divine powers.

In the midst of a war with a neighboring country, Renesha must balance her duties as a healer with her feelings for two alluring knights. When romance blooms on the battlefield, who will be victorious in the battle for Renee’s heart?

I don’t dislike this manhwa trope of accidentally confessing to the wrong person, usually a very scary person. It would be horrible and awkward in real life, but that’s what fiction is for, right? And it usually makes for a sweet and fluffy romance with a huge gap between the guy/girl’s perceived tough image and actual thoughts and actions. I like it.

BUT! We didn’t get any of that in False Confession. The problem is the way the series is structured. It starts with Renesha falsely confessing to Cavert in chapter one. Then it goes on a veeeery extended flashback covering the next 35-36 chapters, showing how they went to war, Renesha fell in love with another guy, they won the war and then she got drunk and confessed.

If they had done all that without the “spoiler” of chapter one, then it would be okay to sit through the whole thing and see how she messes up her love life by confessing to the Duke instead of the Prince she had a crush on. But as it is, 35+ chapters are waaaaaay too many to sit through when you just want to see the confession and the aftermath.

You sit through many, many chapters of Renesha squealing in terror because she’s scared of the duke, complaining about the tough march, gushing and blushing over the prince, and it’s all kind of meh because you know where it’s leading. You know they’re going to come back safe from the war, you know she’s going to get with the Duke, so why all the time wasting?

Plus, Renesha is really annoying. She’s acting all scared and cautious around the Duke when he hasn’t done a single thing to hurt her or anyone she knows. He’s been a little rude, but very supportive and even saved her life in battle. But no, he’s somehow the object of sheer terror. I’m not saying she has to fall in love with him because of that, but why is her fear of him played up multiple times in the series when it’s completely unfounded? It’s annoying.

Nevertheless, despite the slow progression and Renee’s paranoia, I still sat through week after week of minor update after minor update. Then finally, finally, we got to see the false confession and the aftermath… uh, not really. Just when it seemed the whole war arc was over and normal life was about to begin again, the series went on hiatus! 8 months ago! Yipes!

Rumor has it that False Confession will resume between January and June 2021, but we’re already halfway into that period with no resumption in sight. Apart from That Girl’s Damn Wild or whatever it was called, most of the romance manhwa I read that went on hiatus did come back eventually. At the same time, an 8-month hiatus is unusually long, so I’m a little worried.

After all, all the negative comments I’ve made are coming from a place of disappointed expectation. The series is pretty promising though it has yet to deliver. I like the art, I really like both of the male leads though I prefer Cavert. Fans may rage about the uselessness of Renesha in battle, but I thought her struggles, paralysis and depression were pretty normal for a teen from a peace-loving country. It’s weird when normal kids from Korea/Japan/China suddenly become master strategists and gods of war in isekai. I was also looking forward to seeing the power struggles and political intrigue that would revolve around Renee’s healing powers and relationships.

So despite the letdown that was season 1 of False Confession, I’m still hopeful for the next season. Let’s hope I won’t have to write another negative post about it when it finally comes out. See you then!

Update: False Confession is back! In Korean raws and in (mediocre) fan translations, at least! As of June 30th, chapters 46 and 47 are out, and it seem the author is determined to destroy any feeling of “Second Lead Syndrome” in the readers. Not that I ever felt any – Cavert all the way! But no spoilers here. Wait for the official translation, catch up and let’s discussion this again at the end of Season 2!

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.

My Son might be a Villain Chinese web novel review (MTL’d all 100 chapters so huge spoilers)

My Son might be a Villain is one of thousands of “instant parent” web novels, where the plucky protagonist becomes the mother of one or several child characters in another world or from a book she read. Usually the children are very young and almost always male when the protagonist is a Chinese female.

Honestly I rather dislike those series with their precocious little buns. They’re just so unnatural. And no matter how badly the original mother treated the child, within three or four chapters they’re all over the protagonist, being sickly sweet and oh so intelligent despite being barely in pre-school. I mean all these series are unnatural to an extent, but because I have a lot of toddlers in my life, this really stands out.

Summary (from novelupdates):

Su Ran, a music prodigy, woke up transmigrated into a book.

At that point in time, the main story arc in the book had already been completed. As a villainess female supporting character, not only did she need to take over the original owner’s pitiful life in poverty, she also gained an instant son right at his rebellious period.

Ten or so more years from then, the son would turn into a twisted, evil villain. He would appear in one of the extra chapters to pick on the male and female lead’s children.

BTW, the MTL in the title means “machine translated.” It means I read from around chapter 30 to 100 (final) of My Son Might be a Villain using machine translations which aren’t always accurate. But at least they’re fast and free. You can run the chapters through Google translate or a similar site yourself, but it’s faster to visit a site like mtlnovel which has done all the work already.

Normally I like to wait for human translations, because they are much easier to read and understand. There’s really no substitute for competent human translation, at least not in Chinese to English, and not right now. In the case of My Son might be a Villain, however, the translator only updates a chapter a week, sometimes less, and each chapter is split into small frustrating parts. It will take well into next year to finish reading it, and I didn’t want to wait that long.

And I’m glad I didn’t wait either, because the payoff isn’t anywhere near as good as I’d expected.

Su Han (the son)

My Son might be a Villain is a little better than the usual “instant parent” romance series, because the child (Su Han) in question is 13, not 3. He is also portrayed as highly intelligent and good at sports, but not out of the realm of believability for a 13 year old. He’s not managing a conglomerate or fronting a ninja organization like some of these crazy “little buns” do. He’s not even that wordly-wise, having only the vaguest idea of things like work, business and male-female relationships.

While he does warm up unusually fast to the woman who had been neglecting him for 13 years, he never becomes a saccharine sweet “I wuv yu mum-mum♡” kind of character. He’s actually quite tsundere towards his mother, and almost antagonistic towards his dad, but since I low-key hated his dad as well, I was cool with that. Su Han is the rare bright spot in the series.

Oh, I should have mentioned earlier that there are three main characters in the series: Su Ran, the protagonist, her son Su Han, and the son’s father, Lu Shao. Su Ran and Su Han I like, Lu Shao, not so much.

Su Ran (the mother)

Su Ran is also a bright spot in the series. Even though she is the usual “oh so pretty” Mary Sue character, she doesn’t take it overboard. Sure she is so excellent at music that she makes $60,000 in an afternoon by selling songs, and sure she wins international music competitions despite the original body never playing piano before. But apart from that crazy twist, she’s not super popular or all that well-loved, nor is she exactly smart or resourceful. She’s mostly normal, really.

In the original novel, Su Han’s start of darkness was watching his mother get humiliated and murdered at a seedy party. Once Su Ran manages to avoid that ending and starts paying more attention to her son’s development, the rest of the story is basically fluffy slice of life.

Really. There’s hardly any drama after that, so if you’re reading My Son Might be a Villain hoping for love rivals, kidnappings, jealous families, etc etc, forget it. None of that will happen. Su Ran goes out of her way to avoid the original male lead and female lead of the novel – in fact she never does meet the original female lead.

Su Han doesn’t meet the OG male lead’s children either, nor does he fall in love with his daughter. And since his mother was never murdered, he has no motivation to become a villain either. So he’s just a normal junior high school boy who likes to play basketball.

When the OG male and female lead briefly tangle with Su Ran, the new male lead Lu Shao quickly takes over their businesses and effectively exile them from China about 60 chapters into a 100-chapter novel. Then they are never seen again. Lu Shao has also subdued his other business and family rivals already, so everyone is unfailingly polite to Su Ran and Su Han, end of story.

Lu Shao (the father and male lead)

So I’ve discussed Su Han, and Su Ran, now to the final major character Lu Shao. He’s the one that lets the series down, IMO. Without him, or with a better male lead, I would give it close to 5 stars. With him, it’s maybe 3.5/5. Let’s break down many flaws Lu Shao has.

He’s the generic “aphrodisiac rapist” we get in Chinese web novels. The backstory is that he was drugged with an aphrodisiac by his rivals in his family 13 years ago. He stumbled into a hotel room where he found a random 15-year old girl passed out on the bed. Due to in-story reasons, this random girl would also have been bleeding heavily from a gash in her head, but don’t let that stop you, Mr. Rapey CEO.
So he had his way with her, then his employees found him and took him away. Note that he did NOT get amnesia or anything. He just chose not to follow up on her because he somehow assumed that a heavily-injured teenager was part of the conspiracy – or whatever.
In other words, if he hadn’t randomly met Su Han 13 years later, and if Su Han hadn’t happened to look a lot like Lu Shao, he wouldn’t have bothered to look for him ever again. And in the bonus stories after the main series, the author drafts what happened to the original villain Su Han – and he doesn’t meet his father for at least 10 more years, presumably because old Lu Shao doesn’t bother to look for him.
Now then, having found Su Han, does Lu Shao bother to build a positive relationship with him? Nope! His first instinct is to just pay the kid’s child support and let him be. Or forcibly take him away from his mother if the mother is bad. Throughout My Son Might be a Villain, you will look long and hard for very rare scenes of Lu Shao seeking to get to know and interact with Su Han for his own sake, and not for the sake of getting into his mother’s pants.
Yeah, it’s all about getting Su Ran for Lu Shao. And Su Han is just the tool he uses to manipulate his way into her life. Hanging out at their apartment even when she’s clearly uncomfortable, being terse and hostile to the boy (you’ll lose count of the number of times Lu Shao sends Su Han away to “do homework” so he can hit on his mom in peace), and so on.
Meanwhile Su Ran is so naïve that she takes his interest as interest in her/his son. She’s totally blindsided when he finally makes a love confession and marriage proposal. He keeps up the pressure until she agrees to marry him, then pressures her until she sleeps with him, then pressures her some more until she agrees to have another baby. It’s just pressure and manipulation all the way through.

Having said that, Lu Shao is nowhere near as bad as the typical Chinese CEO character. Despite his pushiness, he doesn’t actually force Su Han or Su Ran to do things they don’t want to. He stops the OG male/female lead as well as the Su family from bothering his new family, and does it so thoroughly that they never show up again.

Furthermore, he doesn’t force them to change schools or residences or jobs but instead tries to incorporate himself into their lives. It’s just that he won’t take no for an answer on the “incorporate himself” aspect, so it can be uncomfortable reading sometimes.

When all is said and done, Lu Shao is the only character who seems truly happy at the end. He’s got the woman he wants, and two more children he seems a lot fonder of. Meanwhile Su Ran seemed ambivalent about him – she recognized he was a good guy (oh really?) and wanted to try to like him. In the end it seems like she does like him, but not head over heels in love with him. You won’t get any blissful “I wuv yu so much hubby-wubby♡” scenes from her. Nor will you get any scenes of her pampering or fawning over any of her kids except Su Han.

Last of all Su Han is the most pitiful of all. He dislikes Lu Shao from the start. And Lu Shao never puts any effort into being liked by the boy instead. It’s clear that if Lu Shao hadn’t taken a shine to the hot mother, he wouldn’t have bothered much with the son either.

So for 13 years Su Han had to deal with a crappy mother. Then just when things took a turn for the better, this guy from nowhere shows up, worms his way into your life using you as an excuse, and takes your mother away. At the end of the series, when Su Han is about 16, he seems more resigned to his lot and satisfied that his mother is happy than thrilled himself. It’s a bit sad, but it’s also something that millions of people with remarried parents have had to deal with, so it’s just part of life I guess.

TL;DR – read My Son Might be a Villain if you want a straightforward, no drama rags to riches kind of series. Especially the kind where a kid’s long lost dad suddenly shows up and is so rich and famous no one can touch him and yet is head over heels in love with his son’s young and beautiful mother. There are plenty of similar Chinese web novels, but this one rocks because of the lower levels of drama and the higher IQs of all characters concerned. Even the antagonists are smart enough to know when they’re outmatched.

The only hitch is the pushiness of the male lead and his unfriendliness towards his son. I’ve seen people online fault Su Han for being rude or a tsundere, but honestly his reaction seems normal for a 13-year old who just had a cold father-figure barge into his life. Read for the romance, not for the family warmth because you won’t get that.

Beware of the Brothers manhwa review – Another bait and switch

In the post before this one, I posted about a Chinese web novel that promised one thing, delivered for a while then switched it out for something else. Chinese web novels are not the only culprits. Beware of the Brothers is a manhwa based on a Korean web novel that does the same bait-and-switch.

It offers a tale of a woman who goes back in time to her childhood to try and make sense of her difficult and tragic relationship with her adoptive parents and siblings. And it delivers that for a while in sometimes heartwarming, sometimes painful and sometimes frustrating detail. But then… Ugh. Anyway, here’s the summary first:

Summary: Hari, a destitute girl, got adopted by Duke Ernst at 7 years old when she lost her mother. The Ernsts had themselves lost their youngest daughter Arina and sought Hari due to her resemblance to the late girl.

After suffering all kinds of persecution in 20 years of life at the Ernst estate, Hari is about to escape by getting married. But right before the wedding, she wakes up to find herself back to her childhood in that hellish household. Well this time she’s going to live how she pleases and not repeat the tragedies of the past!

Or so she claims, but if that’s what you’re expecting, forget it. While most “back to the past” protagonists use their knowledge and maturity to change things and improve their lives, Hari in Beware of the Brothers isn’t one of those.

So prepare yourself to see a supposed 27-year old acting like a kid most of the time. Sulking, fighting, arguing with her young brothers Eugene, Cabel and Erich. What you won’t see is a former adult trying to prepare herself for an independent life through education, hard work, networking or anything other kind of common sense behavior. When help is needed, she doesn’t even offer to perform basic bookkeeping or writing tasks even though as a former adult she should have been able to do all that.

While she does try and fail to prevent one great tragedy, that’s the limit of her efforts in that regard. It goes to ridiculous levels when she blandly endures physical abuse for no good reason until her brothers save her. What’s the point of the “adult returned to kid” setting if she keeps acting like a kid? The author would have created a better story by simply having this be her first and only life. There are a lot of series like that, where the “isekai” or “reincarnator” setting feels completely tacked on.

Regardless, none of that is my main beef with Beware of the Brothers. For all her clumsiness and helplessness, Hari is still a pitiable figure who thinks her family never cared about her in the first or second life. The slow, frustrating but ultimately rewarding process by which they all admit that they all care about each other, and the brothers explain that they see Hari as their real sister… it was very sweet and heartwarming to read. After all the annoyances, it was like FINALLY! Phew! And the fandom rejoiced…

…until the timeskip…

…which made it clear that the whole “brothers” thing was a lie…

…and Hari is going to end up in a romantic relationship with her older “brother” Eugene.

hari seducing eugene in beware of the brothers — That’s my line, author.

Back up and let’s review. Beware of the Brothers spent the first 30 or so chapters building a warm and solid family relationship. Then after that it apparently turned into an incest romance series. In other words, the author built the family just to have incest – can’t have incest without family right?

I say “apparently turned” because I stopped reading once I saw a suspicious scene. The usual “bump into each other, ooh he’s so cute” kind of scene. I did a quick search for spoilers, saw the Eugene x Hari ending and noped right out of there.

Well it does say “Beware of the brothers” in the title. It just didn’t use the full version: “Beware of the brothers who may be secretly lusting after their adoptive sister who is a dead ringer for their late little sister.” Eugene is nuts for considering it, but Hari is even harder to understand. For a lifetime and a half, over 40 years, she has seen Eugene as nothing more than a somewhat distant older brother. She was all gung-ho about marrying another, very decent guy. And now it’s suddenly “hey, time to marry my big brother”???

If I were a masochist I would want to see them explain things to their friends, siblings and the society at large, but I’m not one so I dropped out long ago. If you still want to read the series after this spoilerrific post, then clearly incest doesn’t put you off, so enjoy yourself. As for me, and hundreds of fans, we’re just pissed off because the author hid her true purpose so cunningly. If that incest tag had been there from the start, I would never have touched the series. Thus this post is here to warn innocent victims like myself.

On to better, less immoral series!

My Fantastic Chef Wife – Not fantastic at all! (Chinese web novel review)

Just like Japanese isekai series often have the hero winning the natives over with superior Japanese food, Chinese time travel/other world romance series often have the heroine cooking her way to riches and/or her man’s heart. My Fantastic Chef Wife by Di Qiu is just one of many in the cooking isekai genre and doesn’t do much to stand out. However the fact that it had over 180 chapters translated made me try it in hopes of getting a long and satisfying read out of it. Rapey start aside, it could have been really good if it had wrapped up early. As it is… well, I will explain in a bit, but first the usual blurb:

Summary (from Flying Lines):

The five-star chef unexpectedly caught up with the debris flow… When she woke up again, she found herself become a peasant’s wife… Aunts constantly came to bully her families, and there were crazy relatives seeking troubles. Did they really think her strong husband was just a decoration or something?

Her “decorative” husband: “when we get everything done, how will my fantastic chef wife thank me?” “Braised chicken, stewed eel, sesame butter roll, fried meat with fermented bean curd, roasted pheasant…just name it!”

He gave her a smirk and said, “Tonight, I want something different…”

Content warning: As I said, like 80% of Chinese “romance” manhua, it starts with a rape. Worse than that, it starts with the original body of the MC Ye Xiaoxian dying of a drug overdose after being drugged with a pig aphrodisiac by her mother-in-law. I think it’s the novelist’s way of weeding out intelligent and conscientious readers. “Can you make it past this hurdle? Then welcome to the show.” Check your brains out at the door and dive in.

The male lead Xiao Baoshan was also drugged by his mother and thus was a rape victim as well. And he feels much worse about it than Ye Xiaoxian does. That’s the reason I gave this series a pass and decided to keep reading. If he had turned out to be one of those creepy, abusive “You are now my woman” kind of guys, I would have high-tailed it out of there. For her part, Xiaoxian just gets up the next day, dusts herself off, says she understands why the mother-in-law drugged them (?!). Then presto, the story moves on.

In fact Xiaoxian doesn’t even understand why Xiao Baoshan feels guilty and uncomfortable about the whole incident. Even though it’s normal for him to feel bad, seeing as he was DRUGGED BY HIS OWN MOTHER and ended up sleeping with the woman who was originally supposed to be his sister-in-law before his brother died. It’s a really weird and unnatural situation, but if you’ve made it past chapter 2 then you already left common sense behind, so keep moving! Full speed ahead!

First the good parts of My Fantastic Chef Wife

-Once you get past the first two chapters, there’s not much objectionable content. Just FYI.

-The series is exactly what it says on the tin. It’s about a chef and she’s fantastic at what she does. You will see all kinds of people totally bowled over by her fantastic cooking skills, and there are a lot of different foods cooked in almost every chapter early on. Later on she trains others to cook her dishes and innovates less because she has a busy business, but she still cooks often.

-The MC and her family are very hardworking and entrepreneurial. They wake up early to sell food in town, try new ideas, take advantage of gaps in the market, etc. The story is a bit idealistic and there’s a lot of luck involved, but eventually they move from a small roadside stall to their own little restaurant in town.

-Ye Xiaoxian is pretty and talented, but not a complete Mary Sue. Not everyone loves her, not every idea she has is successful. It’s plain that she’s good at cooking and has a decent head for business, but is bad at personal relationships. She lets things slide when she shouldn’t, doesn’t pay enough attention to potential danger and isn’t diplomatic when she should be. Her willful ignorance about how business and bureaucracy works later leads to disaster.

-Unlike most “face-slapping” novels of this sort, her extended family is not that bad. They’re greedy, selfish and stupid, but not actually evil. That leaves room for future reconciliation. While they never become very close, they do eventually develop a mutually respectful and even helpful relationship. Special props go to the mother-in-law Li Hongmei, who is Xiaoxian’s biggest supporter despite being her straight up murderer. She’s also one of the smartest, kindest and most perceptive characters in the book. My Fantastic Chef Wife is weird like that.

-The male lead Xiao Baoshan is a very decent sort who is much more concerned for Ye Xiaoxian’s comfort than she is for his or even her own. He’s neither overly pushy nor overly distant, doesn’t interfere in her business but doesn’t ignore her when she needs help. While he’s no romantic, he still does his best to do what he thinks Xiaoxian will like. This makes it all the sadder to read when she pushes him away and gives all kinds of confusing signals early on. Just talk to the man, woman!

Then the bad parts that made me stop reading (MAJOR SPOILERS)

🚩A hard reset of almost all progress is going to occur around the chapter 180 mark. Due to the combination of a corrupt official, an evil business rival, Baoshan’s own dark past and a looming war, Ye Xiaoxian is separated from her husband and loses her restaurant, her property and her reputation as a good, safe cook.

-This wouldn’t be annoying if it had happened very early, but to hit the reset button after so many chapters of watching Xiaoxian struggle from scratch and build her relationships, that’s just too much. I went and checked to see how many chapters the series has and it turns out there are over 450 out now! In other words, a story which could have been very nicely wrapped up in 200 chapters is being artificially restarted with more drama thrown in just to keep us reading. NO WAY.

Btw, thanks to My Fantastic Chef Wife, now I always check the chapter count of a series before starting. If it’s over 500 chapters and not fully translated, sorry, not reading.

-Since the title has “Wife” in it, you might expect a lot of romance, but you won’t get much. Early on Baoshan is too shy and uncomfortable, then once he warms up to the idea, Xiaoxian is too tsundere. She knows he’s shy and not smart about these things, but she still acts like a kid around him. If he pays attention to someone else, she gets jealous and snippy. If he tries to get affectionate, she finds him clingy and annoying. He runs, she pulls, he comes closer, she pushes him away. The poor man doesn’t know what to do. The reader doesn’t know what she wants. Even she doesn’t know what she wants.

Eventually, and it takes a while but eventually they work through their misunderstandings. They find their way into each others’ hearts (and beds) and things seem to be going well. Then the author forces the reset. Baoshan has to run away and leaves Xiaoxian a divorce note so his enemies won’t bother her. And instead of understanding his intentions, Xiaoxian gets mad and upset and says she doesn’t want anything to do with him any more. Which means we’re going to have to endure another 100-200 chapters before they meet again, and another 100-200 till they work things out, and so on. NO WAY.

-While it can’t be helped due to the way the story plays out, it is clear that as the series progresses there will be much less cooking and much more drama, war, political intrigue, etc. If that’s your kind of thing, sure. But if you just wanted to read a simple countryside romance with some cooking and business – like the series originally promised – then you’re outta luck.

And so for all these reasons, I decided to quit reading My Fantastic Chef Wife. The main character seems to have a screw loose with how quickly she jumps to conclusions, but that’s how she has been since the first chapter so that much would have been bearable.

The bigger problem was the bait-and-switch the author pulled. It’s like getting offered a steak, digging in, and having the plate snatched away and replaced with a salad. Nothing against salad, but that’s not what I ordered. If you give me 180 chapters of the cooking romance you promised and then expect me to read another 250+ chapters of political drama then no, I’m walking away.

TL;DR

Read My Fantastic Chef Wife if you’re looking for a rather frustrating experience (here’s a link to the series btw). Things take a while to go well, then when they do, reset! Back to square one. If you like slow buildups and many challenges in the way of a romance, go for it. Me, I’m out!