In what seems to her to be only a short sleep, young alchemist Mariela finds herself 200 years in the future. You see, she put herself in a state of suspended animation in order to survive a huge monster stampede, but something went wrong and she slept waaaay longer than she was supposed to. Upon waking, Mariela finds that the world around her has changed significantly; the monster stampede destroyed a lot of the town where she lived, alchemy is no longer commonly practiced in the area, and the potions that she once was barely able to subsist by selling are now a premium item. Only, she’s going to have to be careful and keep her abilities secret from all but a select few if she wants to settle into a quiet, everyday life like she wants to.

The Alchemist Who Survived Now Dreams of a Quiet City Life is a mostly tranquil seinen slice-of-life fantasy light novel. I enjoyed its easygoing pace, the fairly extensive worldbuilding, and the “just ordinary folks” characters that grace its pages. There’s definitely a lot of focus on (what is for Mariela) the mundane–gathering ingredients, going shopping, making business deals, meeting people, making potions. I can see that being boring for some people, but I found the placid pace to be relaxing. There were, however, a few things that I didn’t love about this story. For one (and this is quite possibly just me), I found it a bit hard to get into the story right at the start. Also, the author tends to repeat certain bits of worldbuilding information when concepts crop up in different chapters, making me tend to think the sections may have been originally published separately. In any case, it can get mildly repetitive. Additionally, while Mariela’s perspective in the most common (and best, in my opinion), the author does throw other characters’ perspectives in, sometimes seemingly at random, and it’s sometimes hard to tell where one stops and the other starts. My final issue with this story is that slavery is a part of this world, so much so that characters we’re clearly intended to see as “good people” are actively a part of the slave trade. And that just morally bothers me, even though the author builds up excuses like the only slaves are really bad criminals and such. It still gets under my skin. Still, on the whole, I enjoyed this story–enough so that I went ahead and picked up the second volume to start right away, so. . . . Recommended for fantasy lovers who enjoy a quieter-paced, slice-of-life sort of story. ( )