The Fall 2024 Light Novel Guide

Duchess in the Attic

What's It About? 

Opal Holloway is a determined young lady whose ambition makes her stand out among her peers. When her entire life is seemingly changed overnight, she's left without a man to marry. However, she couldn't be more relieved, since she's been secretly in love with her childhood friend Claude. Opal hoped that she wouldn't be forced to marry a noble other than her childhood friend, but bad news arrives. Wed to a childish duke, whose servants refuse to treat her well, Opal feels like the whole world has turned against her.

But Opal isn't one to take things lying down. She decides to use her wealth to steal Duke McLeod's land and manor away! Now in charge, will she be able to transform the servants and the duke? And will she ever be able to forget her first love?

Duchess in the Attic has a story by Mori and illustration by Huyuko Aoi, with English translation by Piyo. Published by J-Novel Heart (September 25, 2024).

Is It Worth Reading?

When I read the manga adaptation of Mori's light novels, which preceded the original into English translation, I had the uncomfortable feeling that all of the time skips were a product of condensing prose into manga. Now that I've read the book, I know that I was wrong: the time skips are absolutely part of the source material. Does that help the feeling of missing something? Not even a little; because the book is intent on covering eleven years in roughly 200 pages, Mori has to do a lot of condensing and to be perfectly honest, that doesn't do the plot any favors.

It's also not clear why Mori decided that the span of years needed to be so high. The novel opens with Opal at age sixteen, being blamed for her own (off-the-page) sexual assault. Because of this, she's considered an unmarriable hussy even though she did nothing wrong and her attacker didn't succeed in taking her all-important virginity (why, yes, this is another light novel set in pseudo-19th century Europe!), which leads to her father forcing her to marry Hubert, the world's worst and most immature duke. Opal's in love with her childhood friend Claude, but he's of lower rank and has gone off on some sort of Grand Tour, so she resigns herself to her fate, determining to divorce Hubert once she attains her majority at age twenty. The majority of the novel covers the years between nineteen and twenty-seven when she's married to Hubert and forcibly saving him from financial ruin.

It really is a pity that this book isn't better written, because Opal is a firecracker of a heroine. She doesn't let anything drag her down – the title comes from the fact that when Hubert and his terrible family try to deny her her rights as a duchess, she simply moves into the attic and finds a way to force him to sign all of his lands over to her before moving out to the ducal country estate and saving his ungrateful ass. She's smart, calculating, and always willing to do the right thing, no matter who in society she has to trample on. She's also doing all of this while heartbroken, convinced that even if she manages to divorce Hubert, she'll never get to marry Claude…who, as the end of the book reveals, has been working on his own to find a way to marry Opal. If you enjoy Regency romances, there's a good chance that this book will appeal to you, because it really does read like one. I wouldn't necessarily warn you away from it despite its pacing issues; just temper your expectations going in and you'll probably have a good time.