My New Devil Wife Volume 1 Review

One of One Peace Books’ final debuts of 2025 was My New Devil Wife, a fantasy manga based on a web novel (later turned light novel) series by Shiryu. But does it prove an entertaining read for fans of the genre, or is it on the lacklustre side? Let’s take a look!

Our story follows Theo Aspel, who was abandoned by his parents as a young child and taken in by an elderly couple. And although his days were filled with joy living with them, they passed away when Theo was still just a young boy. Left with no one to protect him, Theo vows to become strong enough to live independently and sets out to become an adventurer!

Unfortunately, at present, Theo is only 14 years old, and he doesn’t have any magic or real strength to speak of. There’s no quest he can really fulfil all on his own, so he starts teaming up with others to carry their gear and earn a living from that. Sadly, due to his lack of fighting power, the parties often become frustrated with him and eventually kick him out. Now, Theo has turned to the local library, where he’s read a book about summoning a demon to grant his wish. Thinking that will allow him to become stronger, he begins the ritual, but the demon he summons is so beautiful that he soon forgets his original goal and asks her to marry him!

Overwhelmed by Theo’s genuine and adorable proposal, the demon known as Helvy readily agrees. Together, they head to the guild, where Helvy has some choice words with the current adventuring party that’s been mistreating him. And then they take on a quest together, where Theo is about to find out that Helvy is far more powerful than he could have ever imagined.

It has to be said that the set-up for the premise takes so long that it’s hard to get a feel for where the story will go from here. By the time we’ve heard Theo’s backstory, Helvy has been summoned, and the adventuring party has been dealt with, only two short chapters remain. And the thing is that Helvy is so powerful that a quest which should be dangerous basically amounts to being no problem at all, which takes all the tension out of the story. Maybe it will be more slice-of-life focused going forward, but that’s a sharp change in direction compared to Theo’s backstory and the treatment he’s received for a large chunk of this first book.

The other issue I have with this series is that although the romance has been relatively pure so far, it’s clear that Helvy wants to sleep with Theo. And that would be fine if not for the fact that he’s only 14 and the way he’s drawn makes him look even younger than that. Meanwhile, Helvy, while not given an exact age, is clearly a lot older and, given her sexy character design, feels mismatched with him. There’s a weird scene where one of the guild staff also dreams of a sexy situation with Theo, which makes the whole thing feel a little sleazy. If he were or at least looked older, it would be far less of an issue.

These issues make it difficult to recommend My New Devil Wife because so far, there’s very little here that doesn’t feel like it wasn’t just the usual web novel tropes we’re used to seeing being thrown together. There are a lot of contradictions in the narrative, too. Chiefly, that Theo wanted to become strong, but in the end, he’s got Helvy doing the fighting for him, and he’s lost what little agency he had at the beginning. Sure, he’s no longer being bullied by the terrible party he was in, but he’s not following through on his desire either. He’s just being dragged along by the whims of Helvy.

The series has been adapted into a manga by mangaka Tonarikeru, who says in the afterword that it’s their first time working on a manga for a light novel series. I think this might be a mistranslation for web novel, since the light novel came out a considerable time after this. This isn’t their first manga, generally speaking, and the art is relatively polished when it comes to the characters, but there’s not a lot of detail in panels otherwise. This is not helped by Tonarikeru drawing within quite small panels, so there’s not a lot of room for detail either. Ultimately, the art does the job (outside of my complaints about the character designs), but it’s not really memorable.

My New Devil Wife comes to the West thanks to One Peace Books. There are no localisation credits presents and on the whole, the dialogue reads quite stiffly and hard to engage with. There’s also a big error in Chapter 2 that reads “Since getting kicked out of his guild three days ago, Theo hasn’t come into the guild.” But Theo hasn’t been kicked out of the guild; the story is very clear that he keeps being kicked out of ‘parties’. The original Japanese text also reflects this as it reads: “三日前にパーティーを追放されてからテオは一度もギルドに顔を出していなかった”, clearly using the term for party (パーティー). Obliviously duplicate words are a very easy mistake to make, and I don’t necessarily even blame the translator, but it shows a lack of QA. Especially for something that’s been the main premise of the story. This is why I suspect there was a mistranslation in the afterword as well, but I wasn’t able to confirm that the way I did for Chapter 2.

In terms of extras, there are no colour pages, but there is a short story from the original author. The manga is still ongoing in Japan with 10 volumes currently available. Here in English, Volume 2 is scheduled for release in August, but there’s nothing else in the schedule beyond that, so it seems to be on a slow schedule.

Overall, My New Devil Wife’s first volume does little to impress or set itself apart from the crowd. There’s nothing all that interesting here, particularly given my concerns about sexualising such a young protagonist and the general iffy quality of the release itself.

Our review copy from One Peace Books was supplied by Turnaround Comics (Turnaround Publisher Services).