Maybe The Real Magic Was The Credit Card Debt We Made Along The Way: A Review of ‘A Magical Girl Retires’ by Park Seolyeon

• A Magical Girl Retires by Park Seolyeon

• Translated by Anton Hur

• Published by HarperVia

• Fantasy, Magical Realism, Contemporary, LGBTQ+, Novella

• Synopsis

  Twenty-nine, depressed, and drowning in credit card debt after losing her job during the pandemic, a millennial woman decides to end her troubles by jumping off Seoul’s Mapo Bridge.
  
  But her suicide attempt is interrupted by a girl dressed all in white—her guardian angel. Ah Roa is a clairvoyant magical girl on a mission to find the greatest magical girl of all time. And our protagonist just may be that special someone.
  
  But the young woman’s initial excitement turns to frustration when she learns being a magical girl in real life is much different than how it’s portrayed in stories. It isn’t just destiny—it’s work. Magical girls go to job fairs, join trade unions, attend classes. And for this magical girl there are no special powers and no great perks, and despite being magical, she still battles with low self-esteem. Her magic wand . . . is a credit card—which she must use to defeat a terrifying threat that isn’t a monster or an intergalactic war. It’s global climate change. Because magical girls need to think about sustainability, too.
  
  Park Seolyeon reimagines classic fantasy tropes in a novel that explores real-world challenges that are both deeply personal and universal: the search for meaning and the desire to do good in a world that feels like it’s ending. A fun, fast-paced, and enchanting narrative that sparkles thanks to award-nominated translator Anton Hur, A Magical Girl Retires reminds us that we are all magical girls—that fighting evil by moonlight and winning love by daylight can be anyone's game.

The title and cover promise so much whimsy and for what?

In defence of this little novella, it is not completely lacking in whimsy, and the synopsis is quite upfront about the fact that this story opens with a suicide and then takes us on the path of the guaranteed apocalypse in the form of climate change. I think my issue with climate change plots is that the reality of what every day people that may pick up this book can achieve in terms of climate change quite simply vanishes in comparison to the corporate greed that has got us here in the first place. I find it frustrating to experience messages about climate change when most people are simply powerless to do much in the face of these massive corporations who are never going to take these messages in good faith nor seek them out to begin with.

To be fair I think this story does come to that conclusion too. Only one Magical Girl can solve the issue of climate change and all our protagonists can do is hope that she will want to help them. i.e. their futures are in the hands of an all powerful and possibly unfeeling entity that has it’s own motivations that may not align with our main character or the general good. It’s pretty telling that this story does not really end with a neat solution to this problem all tied up in a bow. It would be nice to believe a Magical Girl could simply swoop in and solve existential threats but that would really remove any personal accountability.

““Wait a minute, did you say apocalypse? Like there’s going to be some demon or alien coming to destroy us? Or a huge war? And magical girls already know about this?”

“No, everyone knows about it. Absolutely everyone. The real crisis, the real apocalypse, is climate change.””

Climate change isn’t the only issue tackled here. Our protagonist is unnamed which I think neatly meshes in with some of the messaging of the plot which basically comes to the fact that she could be anyone, that her personal circumstances are not unique. Magical Girls only come into their power when they undergo an event that causes them to need it. A moment marked my powerlessness to the degree that they literally awaken the magic within themselves. This can only work for those with the least power to begin with and that’s why all Magical Girls are, well… Girls. The novel touches a lot on how trapped our MC is the life she must lead according to society so she can do the things she needs to live. She has a dream to make watches but these dreams are left to the wayside after the death of her grandfather in favour of the practicalities of life. A huge amount of our MC’s thoughts revolve around her money problems. The Magical Girl stuff almost feels like a backdrop of this girl experiencing a classic struggling millennial lifestyle and a critique on capitalism as a whole. I’m all for criticizing capitalism but I guess in a mish mash of expectation vs reality, I wasn’t expecting it in my Magical Girl book. I was expecting more… magic. Perhaps the real message is that even magic doesn’t absolve you from paying for your groceries in which case she nailed it but is also not any fun at all.

“‘Way to tell the whole world that a corner of my mind is forever colonized by my credit card debt.’”

Without a name and only a very light touch relation with the magical girl that saves her, I found it quite hard to get attached to our MC which left me a little disconnected from the rest of the story. There are some fun ideas in here for sure. Schools for magical girls, job fairs, talismans and transformation sequences. The idea of Magical Girls in a modern, contemporary setting and just going about their daily business it really fresh. I just felt that combined with the societal critiques that Seolyeon was dishing out, none of these ideas really got time to breathe. Perhaps that’s just the nature of a novella but the pacing felt more like one TV episode rather than a feature length film. I really just wanted more to get my teeth into. Even the romance feels like it’s sort of just thrown out there. To me there was no real build up or even particularly any chemistry. It felt like the author just decided there needed to be a romance so wrote one in.

All in all this little story packs a lot of punch and has a lot to say. The messaging is clear but as a result feels too self aware, getting in the way of the fun parts of the story that are meant to keep the reader engaged enough to take the message in. The moments of levity are often undercut by a very real, looming threat to human life that is just quite anxiety inducing to think about and cannot in reality be magicked away. Maybe this particular non-magical girl is just too anxious to find the fun here.

Recommended for: your friend who still doesn’t get the issue with climate change, your childhood (and probably adulthood) self that has fully planned out your Magical Girl Transformation Sequence