- #1
As for the dropped plot threads, there are too many to describe in this review, but here's a sampler.
Chu Qingxiang bothered me the most among the characters that got dropped. She was present in the story from the opening chapters, she had an interesting character arc, many chapters were devoted to the crisis she kicked up, many more chapters went by where she got ignored, and then right when she was re-introduced to seemingly get her conclusion (or possibly, redemption) - her grandmother gives her a 3-day ultimatum to decide whether or not to divorce her husband - she completely disappears from the story just so Chu Jin can open a supermarket. The supermarket has no lasting impact on the story, it's just an unusually boring exposition of a modern convenience being copied. I was invested in Chu Qingxiang!! This was the only time the novel made me angry.
The thief that tries to bust into their home early in the story is never identified, even though the author brings it up more than once like they're building up to something. Early on, one of Chu Heng's cousins surnamed Luo drugs him and the MC in a convoluted scheme to get his support for her marriage into a (possibly different but still surname Luo) family, so Ye Muyu sends her doctor friend along to cure the brother of the person that cousin is trying to marry so that he can suppress them and we never hear how any of this turns out despite getting so many details about it. Hahaha... During the Duke of Zheng's arc, Ye Muyu notices suspicious people who are suspected of being foreign spies and orders Lu Chuan to keep an eye on them, but then this is forgotten and never mentioned again. Ye Hao (Ye Muyu's brother) has amnesia, but the author can't seem to make up their mind what he can or can't remember, or whether he was on good or bad terms with his original sister. Separately, Chu Heng also gets amnesia (lol), and at first we aren't told what he remembers but later on, the author states that he remembers up to the end of his first life before being reborn, apparently forgetting that they specifically mentioned that he acted very differently toward his wife and parents than he did when he was first reborn.
None of these details really matter to the larger plot. They're just loose ends buried in the thousands of chapters that make up this story...
[collapse]I should mention that the summary is totally off. I don't know why this particular formula is so popular in C-webnovels (blah blah blah original owner was a loser, little white lotus tried to pry my husband, my husband said no! my cousin said back off! my son said ____ my daughter said ___ my cat said ___ and so on) but Tang Rou is not a large part of the story and really has no role to play past the first few hundred chapters.SpoilerFirst of all, we learn that the main character's husband is reborn first. The summary doesn't even mention this. Tang Rou's rebirth has vanishingly little importance because she actually knows less about future events than Chu Heng. She also immediately tells us that Chu Heng never took concubines even when his wife was an embarrassment and never remarried after her early death and never even stepped foot in brothels so there's no tension as to whether Chu Heng will be tempted. It is mind-boggling that Tang Rou would choose such a person as a good target for seduction. Second of all, Tang Rou garners Chu Heng's disgust on sight. He doesn't choose Ye Muyu over Tang Rou, he scolds Ye Muyu for letting her approach lmao. Tang Rou pops up occasionally to make trouble, gets foiled, and then the author doesn't even bother to tell us what happened to her next until she pops up again - e.g., she gets caught by Xie Yu and then we don't find out until she shows up again tens of chapters later that she managed to escape. In retrospect, Tang Rou was the worst-written part of the story.
[collapse]All this being said, the story has undeniable strengths. The early sections when Ye Muyu is just a scholar's wife were really engaging for me. The family drama was interesting without becoming screechy or melodramatic. Ye Muyu handled conflicts with her husband, in-laws, and natal family very maturely. I was really impressed how subtle the interactions between people were. The author clearly prioritized realism over face-slapping, and it makes for better drama. The story carries its momentum out of this provincial setting by shifting focus to Chu Heng's career as an official and the resulting schemes by his coworkers before landing in the arena of imperial intrigue. Your attention is drawn out between smaller stories linked together - from their hometown to the county to Yuzhou to the capital, with antagonists scaling up from the elder sister to the local landlord to the Duke of Zheng to the third prince's maternal family - which works very well overall even if the smaller bits suffer.Someone in the reviews felt sorry for the original owner, Ye Yunlan. (The transmigrated MC goes by Ye Muyu.) I'm sensitive to how transmigration stories treat their "original owners" and this story is not one that deserves to be criticized on that front.SpoilerAt one point, Chu Heng reflects that Ye Yunlan might not have made so many mistakes if she was literate. This is brought up as justification for his support for women's literacy and isn't really a defense of Ye Yunlan. Ye Yunlan is described as a woman who starves her daughter while spoiling her son into uselessness out of a disdain for women that is not shared by her husband, her in-laws, or even her natal family - it is entirely her own opinion. She forces her eight year old daughter to do hard labor purely because she's too lazy to do it herself. She is known for being stingy and mean-spirited toward her in-laws, begrudging them over small gains. We hear disappointingly little about Chu Heng's first life and Ye Muyu never actually runs into the loan sharks that Ye Yunlan fell prey to (even though the author seemed to intend to write about it, guess they forgot), but we see illiterate members of the Chu family reminding each other not to fall prey to that kind of scheme. It's very reasonable to assume the wife of an official would've known better than to sign off on loans & purchases she couldn't read. It's also mentioned in passing that Ye Yunlan plotted against her own daughter and trapped her in a ruinous marriage, thus forcing Chu Heng to have to intervene against the ab*se of her in-laws. The author describes her reckless, selfish, evil behavior as "foolish" because they're being euphemistic, not because Ye Yunlan's worst crime is being silly.
This is all information put out in the opening chapters. Later on, we get to check in on Ye Yunlan twice. First when Ye Muyu falls into a coma, where it's revealed that Ye Yunlan transmigrated to the modern world in Ye Muyu's body. Second when >2000 chapters in, Chu Heng also falls into a coma (lol) and meets Ye Yunlan in the modern world. He describes her as doing well and not wanting anything to do with him anymore.
So even for all her faults, her "punishment" is a comfortable modern life in Ye Muyu's body. This is not a transmigration novel that seeks to justify its transmigration premise by slandering the original owner. I wish people wouldn't twist what I consider a positive point of the story into a negative based off of their assumptions.
[collapse]The webnovel has an abrupt end. Everything ongoing gets wrapped up within chapter 2550 itself, so if you're thinking that the high chapter count at least means the author got to carry the story to its natural conclusion, think again.SpoilerWe never get to see Li Chongjin ascend the throne, the Qi family's downfall is completely blown over, Chu Jin never gets married, Nuan Bao doesn't grow up, and there's obviously no description of the main couple's retired life.
[collapse]This is not a story that relies on a firm central plot or twist to get by; it's much more episodic in nature. Read the opening chapters and you'll know if it's your cup of tea. For me: satisfyingly average. 3/5.