It isn't always easy to find a light novel that takes the familiar tropes of a popular genre and bends them even a little. If you're getting weary of the reborn-as-an-otome-game-villainess subgenre of isekai but aren't quite ready to give up yet, then you're in luck: Cross Infinite World's release of Kosuzu Kobato's I'd Rather Have a Cat Than a Harem may be just what the doctor ordered. It does use plenty of what we're used to seeing from the genre, but its spin on them is just different enough to give the story an edge, while also giving us a heroine who isn't stumbling accidentally into love but actively pursuing her own dreams.

The story follows Amy Northland, who at age ten realizes that she's a former Japanese high schooler reborn into a fantasy world. Even more surprising to her, while she's processing this realization, her parents tell her that they're delighted that she regained her memories, because they, too, have been reincarnated, as has Amy's older brother Harold. The four of them were a family back in modern Japan, and while the story doesn't tell us how they all ended up reincarnating together, it's easy to tell from Amy's comments that there was probably some horrific accident that took them all at once that she's actively repressing. (And can you blame her?) But now that she's awakened to most of her memories, she can understand why there have been some distinct differences in how her family functions compared to other nobles in Luducia, while also appreciating how everyone is using their second chance.

Amy is, interestingly enough, a bit more reticent than her parents or brothers about this whole reincarnation thing. That's largely because there are a few distinct similarities in her current life to images she saw in the opening illustration of a mobile otome game that one of her high school friends made her download. Amy never actually played the game – romance games weren't her thing – but her mother was an avid enough consumer of web novels that she's fully aware that if she really is in the game's world, she's probably the villainess. To say that this freaks her out might be an understatement, and that's where her parents also being reincarnations really comes into play. Her mother, despite her love of villainess isekai, is very firm with Amy about the fact that even if this world was a game in their old life, in this one, it's the real world – and that means that there's no such thing as game mechanics. That's refreshing, because it's the failure to realize that very fact that gets a lot of similar heroines bogged down in the details, and even if Amy can't fully shake her fears, her parents are devoted to helping her every step of the way. Her father, specifically, wants Amy to have the life she didn't get to before, and if this world hasn't exactly had a feminist revolution, he's still going to do his best to make sure that Amy has every chance she wants. To that end, her parents are endlessly helpful – Amy doesn't want to be a candidate to marry Prince Edward? Okay, let's see what we can do about that. Amy and her father are no longer allergic to cats in this new world? Wonderful, let's see about getting Amy the cat of her dreams and letting her train to be a magic veterinarian. Their support is a highlight of the story, even when it's kept in the background, and it helps to let Amy be a fairly different heroine than we typically see.

Another way that she differs from the usual protagonist is that she's not slender. Described as “chubby,” Amy's parents don't go in for the whole stick-thin = beautiful thing, and if that initially starts as a way to avoid Edward's notice (since she won't be traditionally beautiful) it turns out to be rather more, as it's later discovered that Amy's larger body mass makes her magic both more stable and more powerful. Anyone who snarks about Amy's weight quickly learns that the outside is no indication of the inside of a person, and she is generally accepted for who she is. Needless to say, Edward doesn't care a jot about her size, nor does Alexander, another potential love interest, so it doesn't quite work the way that Amy and her mom initially planned, which is a very nice statement about stupid beauty standards right there.

Of course, the draw of the story is its title, and while the book takes a while to get to Amy directly having the revelation described by it, we can see her building towards it, so it doesn't feel like things are dragging. Also worth noting is that the book takes a very “adopt don't shop” attitude to procuring a cat; a duchess runs a cat rescue out of her home, and that's where Amy finds Tigger, a cat surrendered to the duchess when his owner died. The entirety of Amy and Tigger's relationship is warm and familiar – Tigger needs time to adjust and get over the loss of his previous human, and Amy is patient with winning him over. Later Amy helps her friend Rosalind get an injured cat to the rescue, resulting in Rosalind adopting Portia, and Amy decides to direct her healing abilities to animals in the future. The author clearly understands the bond between a person and their pet, as we see with Edward's interactions with his horse and owl as well as Amy's relationship with Tigger, and this adds to the novel's appeal.

There are a few stumbles, such as a few too many “interludes,” separate short chapters that mostly could have been folded into the main story, and we don't get a clear picture of the overall technological level or fashion of Luducia. But I'd Rather Have a Cat than a Harem! has many more hits than misses, and even if you don't relate to the title as much as I do, it's worth picking up to watch Amy and Tigger's story unfold.