The Saga of Tanya the Evil, Vol. 1

Deus lo Vult

By: Carlo Zen, Shinobu Shinotsuki, Kevin Steinbach - translator

Narrated by: Monica Rial

High above the blood- and mud-soaked trenches, a young girl pits herself against army mages in high stakes aerial duels with bullets, spells, and bayonets. Her name is Tanya Degurechaff and she is the Devil of the Rhine, one of the greatest soldiers the Empire has ever seen! But inside her mind lives a ruthless, calculating ex-salaryman who enjoyed a peaceful life in Japan until he woke up in a war-torn world. Reborn as a destitute orphaned girl with nothing to her name but memories of a previous life, Tanya will do whatever it takes to survive, even if she can find it only behind the barrel of a gun!

A dry text is given new life by a skilled narrator

I've tried and failed to read a number of these translated light novels, but translation leaves a universal blandness to the texts. Monica manages to make a nigh intolerable read something I am eager to get more of. I hope she narrates the full series

Good performance

The voice actress from the anime reads this which is cool. Every single thought the character could have has been written out between lines of dialogs in seems making it sometimes difficult to follow. Often times scenes will change without much warning.
Enjoyable and complex.

Absolutely loved it!

I watched the anime as it aired and always wanted to read the LN but never had the time.
The narrator did a fantastic job! I listened to it while working a 3rd shift job and always felt engaged and never bored. Definitely recommend to anyone interested especially if the anime left you wanting more!

Great book, but...

This is the only book Monica Rial is narrating! The next few have a different narrator, and then the one after that has yet another one! I'll continue complaining after the review.

I watched the first couple episodes of the anime and wasn't remotely interested. But thanks to Audible having a return policy, I figured I might as well give the audiobook a chance. Boy am I glad I did. Such a great Isekai-Fantasy-WW2 alternate history...I could probably list more genres this thing touches on. But it does all of them well. Monica is fantastic as a narrator, and as the English voice of Tanya, she obviously wins at that. The 2 major complaints I saw in reviews were "anti-religious" and "too many asides" and I want to address those.

Anti-religious: the character has a very good reason to hate God (which is the first thing in the book, so not a spoiler). And since this is fiction, the God in this universe is not the same as the one in the real world. As a religious person I took absolutely no offense at anything God-related in this book.

Asides/footnotes: literally every time there's a footnote after the first chapter, it happens as I pull my phone out to Google thing thing the footnote explains. I personally thing the detail these sidetracks go into are perfectly reasonable. Early on there are more footnotes that are a bit long and unnecessary. That's a legitimate complaint. It makes the early going really slow to get into. But once you get into the story, that's over!

Ok, finally, more complaining about the narrator changes, which have nothing to do with this book by itself:
I find it hard to listen to a series when they change narrators, most especially after an epic performance by a narrator. Which this was. So I'm really disappointed, even though I'm sure whoever they got is perfectly capable. I won't be getting book 2 right away, if at all, because of that. Which sucks, because I was really looking forward to it when I finished his one. I will be going back to the anime, though.

awesome

very much enjoyed, looking forward to the next book.( I have not seen the anime yet)