[DeepL Translation - needs review] Volume 1 Introduction: Many siblings were born when their father remarried. However, your presence in an all-male household causes a stir among the brothers...? The first story describes the shocking first conflict between the main character and his brothers, the second story is about witnessing the brothers' suspicious activities, the third story is about a thrilling night on a midsummer vacation, and the fourth story is about the main character who catche...
Should have been an easy learner's LN, but poor digital formatting squashes that.
"Brothers Conflict" is the novelization of an otome game series by the same name; having never played the original games, I can't speak to how well this adapts them, or even if it focuses on one specific game, so those points will be disregarded in my review.
Our 16-year-old protagonist (who, as far as I can tell, never gets anything but a last name in true otome fashion, 日向 [ひなた]), finds out one day that her rarely-present, globe-trotting adventurer father has remarried, and that she'll be moving in with her new stepmother's family. Said stepmother is a highly successful career woman who has not one, not two, but thirteen sons, ranging in age from 10 to 31. Thus begins 日向's new life going through stock standard otome trope situations with a bunch of boys who all pretty much immediately start crushing on her in one way or another.
Honestly I kind of liked all the standard, tropey situations she finds herself in. There's something about easy reading comfort food to be able to just zoom through. This is a super easy light novel in terms of vocabulary and grammar; not only that, but there are tons of illustrations scattered every two or three pages, further decreasing the page space able to hold text. There unfortunately isn't consistent furigana for every kanji, but because the book chooses the rather odd route of following a VN-style system of marking whoever's speaking with a little box with a kanji from their name, it becomes really easy to follow which of the thirteen boys is currently speaking.
Unfortunately, my major caveat in recommending this to learners is that, at least for the Kindle edition, every single page is an image, likely due to the page formatting (three rows of text per page) and massive number of illustrations, making it impossible to look up definitions easily with the Kindle's built-in dictionary. Any furigana given is miniscule and poorly contrasted, making it extremely difficult to read, and the boxes with the speaker's kanji initial are also really small, smushing the kanji into near illegibility quite often. These issues would perhaps be mitigated for learners who pick up a physical copy of the book, but I have a hard time recommending it digitally at present.