The Apothecary Diaries: Volume 1 (Light Novel)

I loved the anime, so I had to get into the books! It's really fascinating to see how the original story has more of a classic mystery novel feel, kind of brushing past the setup of the rear palace and Maomao's place in it to get into Jinishi asking for her help to solve these seemingly unconnected problems. The slow buildup into showing how everything is connected is a strength of the volume, but it also puts it in contrast to the anime adaptation. The show does an excellent job in presenting the source material, don't get me wrong, but it also benefits from the hindsight of knowing what actually ends up as important to the story. As a result, there's a lot more detail and foreshadowing put into some areas that just does not exist in this book. While I love how everything came together, most of the volume felt like the author was also trying to figure out what kind of story this was. Some scenes had a lot of passive language, and the descriptions are sparse, causing the illustrations to do most of the heavy lifting in terms of imagining how the characters look. To be fair, I'm not sure how much of that might have been impacted by the translation, but if I didn't have the context of the anime to help me out, there are times when I would've been lost on what was happening or the significance of certain scenes. Overall though, it's still an incredible opening to the series, and I'm excited to get to the point where the anime left off to find out what happens next! 

I wasn't sure whether this would be super interesting, but I was pretty much hooked from the start and the only reason it took more than a couple days for me to read was a bunch of library books coming off hold.

Maomao is a fun protagonist, using investigative abilities on par with Sherlock to figure out the mysteries of the rear palace and her skills as a pharmacist to help resolve them. Plenty of interesting mysteries in here, all layered together so that nothing feels unnecessary by the end of the book. The romance is pretty minimal, which I would consider a bonus since it was the weakest part.

Very solid book, and I'll be happy to grab more of them as they come out.