Maomao is now under the employ of Jinshi, but otherwise her life continues as it has. Her insatiable curiosity still lands her in trouble and mysteries cross her path more often than not. But if it isn’t broke…
Look, let’s cut to the chase. This is four stars worth of very good mysteries of various stripes and some semi-factual, if dodgy, science. Normally that would be the end of it, since the story is the point of it all.
Less so this series, however, which is one of the all time greats for me simply because Maomao is one of my favourite characters ever. I absolutely love every aspect of her mischievous, hopelessly crazy for poison persona.
The story, for me, exists as a backdrop for her antics, which are brutally funny and very entertaining and drawn in a way that makes the most of the manga format. A strong, smart, capable female doing her best in a world of frequently disdainful, often hapless, males in positions of power is great.
No matter how long it takes until my hunches about Jinshi are proven correct, the development of his relationship with Maomao has been a real joy. Basically, he’s clearly grown to care about her a lot, but she has exactly zero time for romance unless she can see if it will kill her when she eats it.
Yeah, I love mysteries, but this book makes me laugh at lessons for females in, uh, practicing politics, and a truly ghastly looking gift from Jinshi that Maomao is dreaming about almost all volume. There’s a lot of drive to our heroine and she’s not one to leave her curiosity dissatisfied, which makes her a natural fit for the various shenanigans at the court.
There’s no grand plot in motion just yet, we get a lot of pieces added in here and there but it’s all background to these little nuggets of life in a palace of schemers jockeying for position and a little deductive adventure here and there.
If you want a grand, sweeping story, this isn’t it. If you want a character study featuring a delightful imp who gets upset when she can’t try to nearly kill herself with blowfish and solves arsons on the side, well, this is the same delight it’s always been.
5 stars - 4 star story, but Maomao being Maomao is always enough for me to devour every new book in this series very happily. Nothing new, but no less brilliant despite that.