Review of Wandering Witch: The Journey of Elaina

Overall Story
It’s a good light novel and definitely worth a read, however I think the one aspect that makes it special is also its downside: nearly every chapter is a different story in a different place with mostly different characters. This allows the light novel to explore different themes and different tones however this is also a downside because you cannot form any attachment to anything besides the characters (which aren’t exactly stellar, though they’re not bad) so it feels more like reading a series of short stories rather than the more standard single story with different arcs.

*Notable exception in volume 7 where about half of the book is dedicated to a single story (that story is also my favorite)

Characters
As I’ve mentioned before the characters aren’t great. They don’t have much depth and a lot of them seem one dimensional, often following typical character tropes. Our main character and some reappearing characters are more developed however they’re still nothing to rave about. The leading characters are also (and I’m pretty sure) all female, the author does seem to have a thing for Yuri. This does have an explanation as for some reason women are better at spell casting in this world.

One interesting aspect on this is the “witch” system. As a comparison to the real world, this world’s magic casters certification system is akin to the real world’s educational system whereas the title of “witch” would be a PhD. And so there is this sort of hierarchy of status between the characters as well as “factions” (although this aspect isn’t very developed) notably with the United Magic Association. The title being so hard to achieve: the ones who have achieved it are forces to be reckoned with. The magic in this world is surprisingly well developed, although not used much. The series not focusing on fights allows the few who do happen to be more interesting: they are often not decided by pure strength like it may be in other works, but rather by other aspects of one’s “strength”, eg,. Intelligence, planning, setting, etc…

Setting
The setting changes with every chapter depending on how much that chapter’s story relies on it. Individually they’re all great and complement the story quite well however they don’t seem to form a world together: each setting is so different from the other that there’s not much coherence between them, that makes it a little hard to imagine them all woven together in a single world. They all usually follow the medieval, magical and fantastical kind of style however they are all distinct. Thus each setting feel like it’s own individual, original thing however rarely do they mention each other or have links to each other.