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A legendary miner teams up with a runaway princess to combat demons and track down cursed jewels in this hot new light novel series, known in Japan as Scoop Musou ! The strongest miner in the world, Alan can reduce mountains to rubble with a swing of his trusty shovel—a legendary tool that grants him immortal life and can blast through the strongest of foes. When this legendary miner teams up with a runaway princess to track down cursed jewels and save her kingdom from an invading demon force, evil doesn’t stand a chance. A hilarious fantasy tale for fans of RPGs, with adventure... in spades!

280 pages, Paperback

First published February 25, 2019

28 people are currently reading
45 people want to read

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Yasohachi Tsuchise

13 books3 followers

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5 stars
19 (27%)
4 stars
16 (23%)
3 stars
14 (20%)
2 stars
9 (13%)
1 star
10 (14%)
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
Profile Image for Rebecca.
4,369 reviews69 followers
November 19, 2021
This book knows that it's ridiculous and that its heroine is obnoxiously annoying and it really, really enjoys itself with that. It's hard not to like it for its good humored nature and the truly bizarre plot points.


EDIT: Dropped a star, as upon reflection all I can remember is that it got worse and worse as it went on.
Profile Image for Rebecca.
72 reviews2 followers
December 29, 2022
Regretting not just DNFing this book, honestly. Why I forced myself to finish this book is beyond me. Maybe I was just hoping that something - literally anything - would happen to redeem the story, but OMG IT JUST KEPT GETTING WORSE. All of the characters are just imbeciles. There are no rules to the magic system, and any rule that does happen to come up just gets tossed aside anyway because of the whole "most powerful tool in the world" bs storyline. The female characters are needlessly obtuse just to continue the 'misunderstanding' trope that keeps getting worse and worse. Inserting the word shovel into every other sentence just to reiterate the obsession, the innuendos, all of it. 110% not worth reading this book, and 10000% not continuing this series.
236 reviews
May 2, 2023
Occasionally sort of funny, but extremely one-note.

It’s also much hornier than the description might lead you to assume, although taking a second look at the cover, it’s probably my fault for being surprised. Horniness doesn’t bother me per se, but I do want to record for posterity how Yasohachi Tsuchise describes a female slave on the auction block: “Hanging from her neck was a sign with a price tag. And then there were her breasts, which were massive. There was even some underboob action going on, due to her current attire.”
Profile Image for Drake Nichols.
13 reviews2 followers
December 25, 2020

The strongest miner in the world, Alan can reduce mountains to rubble with a swing of his trusty shovel--a legendary tool that grants him immortal life and can blast through the strongest of foes. When this legendary miner teams up with a runaway princess to track down cursed jewels and save her kingdom from an invading demon force, evil doesn't stand a chance. A hilarious fantasy tale for fans of RPGs, with adventure... in spades!

43 reviews2 followers
March 13, 2020
Fun, but absurd

It's kinda like a parody of Arifureta, but with shovels. And instead of a useless rabbit you have a princess who declared herself the high priestess of The Holy Shovel Faith.

If you want a serious story, don't read this. This is just concentrated absurdity.
Profile Image for Cell.
452 reviews31 followers
April 30, 2020
又是你!
居然能比前一本作品《蕎麥麵(好可愛)》還更莫名
變成鏟級搞笑的電波作品啦

作者在主角群中還留下1位常識人真是令人感到安心
--
在後記中
沒能立刻從「某個害羞到要挖土把自己埋起來的偶像」、「代表偶像的物品,『鐵鏟』」判斷出是指萩原雪步
實在是MLTD玩家失格
Profile Image for Efreak.
31 reviews26 followers
September 6, 2020
From the author's note at the end:

I’m sure it’s rather difficult for you, my readers, to really think of this as old-school fantasy. But to me, it is.

Keep this in mind while you read.
2,534 reviews17 followers
September 1, 2021
Weird and gross. The shovel joke was not enough to carry the perfunctory plot.
Profile Image for Nathan C. Weber.
14 reviews
October 2, 2020
It's a little difficult to get through this story. It breaks all conventions of standard light novel story telling that it really throws you off. But do not give up on it. Once you get into the rhythm of things, you'll realize that you've found a rough gem of a story.

The book itself is not intended to be taken at all seriously. In fact, over-the-top absurdity is the watch word of the day. The main character Alan, a half-dwarf miner, is a bland but likeable character. He seems dense, but I suspect he understands more than he's willing to admit, and is ignoring what's right in front of him in order to save his sanity. Considering the wacky princess he's teamed up with, this is a wise move. The other facet of Alan's personality is that what he considers normal and everyday is considered god-like and against the laws of the universe to others. He is often quite baffled by people don't understand him.

The story takes a while to hit its stride in this volume, but rest assured, once you get to volume two, you will have been won over by it.
Profile Image for Alyssa.
564 reviews
February 3, 2026
This…This is not good. There is so much wrong with it. I had concerns early on when Lithisia explained the plot.

Lithisia, the princess of Rostir, goes into a long-winded explanation about why she is not in her castle, and why she needs help. At first, this description sounds very similar to the situation with Jafar and Jasmine from Aladdin. But as she goes on to say she has a body double covering for her, I can’t help but wonder why the villain can’t just force the body double into marriage and make everyone think he married Lithisia. Her story seems to have a significant amount of potential problematic holes in it.

After that, everything just becomes absolutely ridiculous. The characters are more like caricatures. Lithisia becomes hyper-religious about shovels, to the point she very obviously wants to turn her country into a cult. Her personality becomes the embodiment of shovel worship. I know the intention is to be for comedy, but it just paints her as a complete airhead and makes her annoying. Her friend Catria is the only person who does not buy into her new shovel religion.

Another aspect of the story I find annoying, everything has to be thought of as erotic or an innuendo. The joke is that girls want Alan sexually, but he’s too dense to realize it, because in his mind, there is no way that could possibly be what they want. I think the book does a poor job with this kind of humor. It’s like it’s trying to be a harem without actually committing to being a harem since the dude isn’t interested in anybody.

I guess, the long of the short is, it feels too try hard. I know it’s absurdist comedy, but I think it could still be that and be written better. It says it’s for teens, but the humor feels more juvenile than that age group despite a lot of it being sexual jokes.

Maybe it’s just not my kind of comedy, but I genuinely did not enjoy this. I have no interest in reading more volumes, so my copy will be going into the donate pile. If you want to read something good with absurdist humor, I recommend JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews

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