From the same author as Spice and Wolf comes a tale about Alchemists and their pursuit of knowledge. As one would expect from the author, the world-building is top-notch. Doubly so since it's set in the middle ages where the author already has some experience.

I'm not sure what the other reviewer is going on about. Yes, the MC's aren't going to induce a revolution and slay dragons. Yes, they aren't perfect, nor are they paragons of light. But for those that have read, and are fans of Spice and Wolf,... more>> you get more of that slice-of-life story interspersed with important decisions that bring changes to each MC's way of life. It's a story of trust, courage, and talent as the characters work together shake off those that seek to hold them back and take one more step toward some final unknown goal. <<less

A dark story of flawed people pursuing their dreams in a crapsack world. Political, social, and military violence is a core background, with the initial evolution of alchemy into a science and the various horrors of religious fanaticism as the stories primary templates. The writing / translation is decent, and the early story thoroughly avoids or inverts the standard cliches and creates solid, though somewhat unsympathetic characters.

The storyline follows a 'start in the middle' format, with the reader having to piece together the situations from the clues in the... more>> dialog, with very little expositional worldbuilding. This can be a strong style for building characters by good writers, but does suffer from decay due to some awkwardness in the translation, sometimes making it quite difficult to understand.

Pretty much all the characters are definitely not heroes, but not entirely villains, with each character presenting a deeply flawed personality combined with their own objectives, and using those flaws to weave the drama in the story as a background to their pursuit of their objectives.

Not rating this, as the translation and story can be considered tolerable, but I have a strong aversion to the type of implied hopelessness in such a crapsack world scenario. <<less