A millennial turned magical girl must combat climate change and credit card debt in this delightful, witty, and wildly imaginative ode to magical girl manga.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Park Seolyeon’s A Magical Girl Retires, which is available from April 30th 2024.
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.
“Me? A magical girl?”
I’d seen them on television. Not the ones in cartoons waving their magic wands and transforming
into powerful beings—or into powerful outfits—and vanquishing monsters and aliens, but the ones on the news. Those who use their superpowers or magic or whatever to rout out criminals and rescue people in dire need. The difference between the magical girls in animation and on the news is whether their enemies are imaginary nuisances or real-life evil and disasters. Like capturing bank robbers using their summoning spells and stopping car accidents with their telekinesis.
From what I understand, there were two reasons why we called them “magical girls” instead of using that other pop culture cliché, “superhero.” One, they themselves asked to be called magical girls. Two, this magic only seemed to manifest in girls. Therefore . . .
“I . . . don’t think I’m young enough to be a magical girl?”
The taxi was rapidly but smoothly zipping off the bridge, and the angelic beauty who had seated me next to her in the backseat was rummaging through her handbag. The handbag was completely white, like the woman’s clothes, and it had a coin-purse-like clasp that snapped shut with a satisfying tak.
The woman turned to me and asked, “How old do I look?”
“How old are you?”
“That’s a secret.”
I could almost see the outlines of her smile behind her white mask. I’d thought she was a little strange, but . . . this was really silly.
She held out a card. “This is who I am.”
Trade Union for Magical Girls
Officer Ah Roa
Obviously, she didn’t write her age on the card.
“It’s true most of the magical girls out there are girls,” she said. “But not all magical girls are girls. You don’t have to look like a girl on the outside to become aware of your gift, and it’s not like we don’t age after we come into our calling.”
I think I had heard that the longest-working magical girl was old enough to be called Grandmother.
“When is the proper age to shed the moniker ‘girl’? Do you stop being one with your first period? Are you an adult once you grow taller than 160 centimeters? When lots of adults don’t reach that height anyway? And is it not true that all of our girlhoods are different, not just in terms of physical growth, but in the growth of our hearts and minds?”
She had a point. I mean, when did my own girlhood begin and end, exactly? I couldn’t quite circle a lasso around it, but I knew, at least, when it had ended. Three years ago, when Grandfather died. To be fair, I was already beyond the age one can call oneself a girl, but at least until that moment I hadn’t thought of myself as particularly grown-up. Because it was all right not to. Up until then.
“They say great power comes with great responsibility. There are many complicated things happening to magical girls. Things like liability for property damage during their activities or being denied insurance coverage. Magical girls of legal age have it even worse. The other cases I just mentioned might be mitigated by having a legal guardian, but an adult magical girl has to take care of everything on her own. Which is why we needed a union.”
Her mention of insurance, as well as her silver-tongued delivery of her spiel, made me instantly wonder if she was trying to sell me health insurance.
“And what does this have to do with me again?” I asked.
“With our new focus on collective action, we’ve also begun to invest in the discovery and education of new magical girls.”
Roa showed me the other object she held in her hand. It looked like a cosmetic compact, its rim shimmering in rainbow colors. In the little mirror, my face reflected back at me.
“Uh . . . What about this thing?”
“Doesn’t it seem a little different to you?”
Roa held the mirror this way and that. Come to think of it, my reflection wasn’t exactly mine. My eyes weren’t red and puffy from crying, and I also was not wearing a mask. I looked so much like my normal self that it seemed almost ridiculous I hadn’t noticed right away. It looked like a very good passport photo, right there inside Roa’s compact.
“This is my talisman,” Roa said. “I call it the Ahroamirror.”
“Why . . . is my face inside it?”
“It proves you’re destined to be a magical girl.”
Just as she had on the bridge, she gripped my hand.
“That’s my talent.”
What was her talent? Holding strangers’ hands? Showing people images of themselves in the mirror? Unable to look at Roa and the Ahroamirror at the same time, my eyes kept going back and forth between them, until Roa cleared her throat.
“Let me introduce myself. I am Ah Roa, the Clairvoyant Magical Girl. An officer of the union whose mission is to find the greatest magical girl in the world.”
At that moment, I couldn’t check my expression through the Ahroamirror—why on earth had I thought it was a mirror in the first place, how odd—but I’m sure my face might as well have had the words So what writ large across it. But when I heard what Roa had to say next, it all made sense. It was like my whole life, not just this car ride, had been building up until this moment.
“We believe that the Magical Girl of Time is the greatest magical girl of all.”
Excerpt from A Magical Girl Retires by Park Seolyeon, trans. by Anton Hur. Published by HarperVia. Copyright © 2024 HarperCollins.
