Is Trash of the Count's Family worth reading?
Is Trash of the Count's Family worth reading? A slacker in a villain's body, a found family he never asked for, and the one joke that never gets old.
Ask a room of Korean-novel readers for a comfort read and Trash of the Count's Family (백작가의 망나니가 되었다) comes up before anyone has finished the question. Is Trash of the Count's Family worth reading? Readers say yes, warmly, and then argue about how many chapters that yes covers.
What Trash of the Count's Family is
Kim Rok Soo, an office worker, reads a fantasy novel called The Birth of a Hero and wakes up inside it as Cale Henituse, the drunken young lord of a count's family in the Roan Kingdom. In the book he half remembers, Cale exists for one purpose, which is to pick a fight with the hero Choi Han in the first chapters and get beaten badly for it. Cale's plan is to skip that scene, be polite to the hero, and live off the family money doing nothing at all.
Nothing goes to plan. The novel is a long comedy of a man trying to stay out of the story while the story keeps collecting him, and the English print edition from Seven Seas carries the title Lout of Count's Family, which is the same book.
Is Trash of the Count's Family worth reading for the cast?
That's the answer most readers give. Cale is the draw, a lazy, sharp, oddly tender man who insists he isn't a hero while doing heroic things for cynical-sounding reasons, and readers keep describing him in contradictions. Around him grows a household of strays, a baby dragon and a butler who used to kill people for a living among them, and the family feeling is what people say they return for. Readers also love that there's no romance at all, and that the plot twists are earned.
The running joke, Cale's reputation drifting further from the truth with every chapter, works because the book never winks. He means it every time he says he's trash, and everyone around him has stopped listening.
What divides readers
Length and repetition. The book is over a thousand chapters, and readers report a stretch in the middle hundreds where it slows, plus phrases and misunderstandings that come back once too often. The cast gets so large that early companions fade, and some readers tire of everyone pitying a lead who is, by then, plainly not weak.
Pick it up if you want a long, funny, low-stakes-feeling epic with a found family at the center and don't need a love story to keep turning pages.
Based on reader reviews; we'll write our own once we've finished it.
If you enjoy it, support the author where it's published: KakaoPage. Licensed English edition: Seven Seas.
Try Crossleaf. Bring a story in any language and read it in English, chapter by chapter, with the original a tap away. Start reading free →