家つくりスキルで異世界を生き延びろ

Lots of interesting ideas

This book tries to do a lot at once. At least 10-12 significant characters appear in this volume, including people of different fantasy races, animals, and fairies. A lot of time is devoted to explaining the isekai world's skill system including the relative rarity and level of different skills, and how society functions based on it. There's also a group of people in this world, called ニホン族, who are all reincarnated from modern Japan and have memories of their past lives. The protagonist Chris is one of them, but keeps that fact a secret from everyone, and also spent her early years in this world apprenticed to a witch before regaining her past life memories, so she has a lot going on already.

A lot of the ideas at play are really interesting, and I liked how most of them were handled, but somehow it felt like the book was missing a 'soul' a lot of the time. The prose wasn't very interesting, and while the plot never disappointed me, it also didn't get me excited. Chris is a very logical, well prepared, smart protagonist, which was enjoyable to imagine but caused digressions during the action where the author had to explain what type of magic paper Chris was about to use, where she had been storing it, what level it was, and why she didn't use a different one instead. And, I can't deny, it took me some time to get used to reading the name "Chris-chan" unironically 😅. The art is great though! It's by the same illustrator as 狼と香辛料, which is actually why I picked it up in the first place.

Language wise, the grammar and overall writing style gave me no trouble, but there were more unusual words than I would have expected for an Isekai LN that looks like this. Furigana is there for uncommon words, but not most of the time.