Princess Book Lover ‒ Episode 12

It might take a while to get there, but we did at the end One episode saw how Elianna was changing and learning to step out of her comfort zone. The moment isn’t as loud or flashy as her previous protagonists, but it’s still powerful in its own way. It also happens to come at the end of the Madam Sharon storyline; the imp is convinced she has found a way to abdicate Eli in favor of her sister: she offers Elianna a very rare book. The price, of course, is that in exchange for being allowed to borrow the book, Eli will have to step aside and make Sharon Chris’ prom date. The idea is that this means Christopher is willing to dump Eliana in order to marry the recently widowed Madame Mireille, which was Madame Sharon’s goal from the start.

Even if we ignore the fact that Sharon didn’t even provide Elianna with the book a more On a perpetual basis (which wouldn’t come as a surprise, given her demands that she relinquish the title of queen of the country), the whole thing really does a good job of illustrating just how smug, confident, and uncomfortable the Union is Mrs. Sharon. Chris makes her admit that everything she does is not at the behest of the duke who rules her home province, but out of her own misguided ambitions. Sharon wholeheartedly believes in popular myths that mourn the separation of the fictional Chris and Mireille. No one, except Sharon and Eliana, was surprised that these stories were revealed to be nothing more than sleazy publicity.

I don’t think this is meant to put the two on the same level; Sharon’s belief in these stories can be attributed to her desperate love for her sister, and Eliana’s willingness to accept these stories as a fact is a testament to her own deep-rooted insecurities. So her rejection of the book offered by Sharon in favor of staying connected to Christopher is an example of not only her finding joy in not reading, but her faith in Christopher himself. She decided to take his word for it, that she was really the one he wanted to marry, no matter what the gossip said. Between this episode and the end of the episode where she puts down her book and goes for a walk with her fiancé, we can see Eliana making real progress as a character. However, it does feel a bit too late. This is the main failure of this adaptation: it is very difficult for us to really get to know Eliana as a person. We know she loves to read, we know she’s smart and insecure, but we don’t understand how she’s changed. Even Chris’s repeated efforts to show her how much he loves her doesn’t feel like enough of an impact on the kind of massive growth that makes her realize that there are other things for you to enjoy besides books. Was it also because she realized that if she wanted to stay with Chris, she had to learn to do things that would allow her to survive in court? Maybe, we really don’t know. Eli remains basically a wide-eyed blank slate by the end, which is bad for her character, the whole story, and if I’m being dramatic, for all of us bibliophiles who would rather read than interact is disadvantageous with another person.

‘The run did not cover all available books. Partly because the latest (translated) novel ends on a cliffhanger, but also because it’s a really good ending point. If you have even the slightest bit of interest in anime, I recommend checking out the light novels; they do a better job of polishing out the characters and the story. It’s not a great show, but if it got people interested in the source material, then I guess it’s done its job.

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is currently playing on HIDIVE.