くまクマ熊ベアー 10

Whoooah, we're halfway there! Yep, this is the halfway point of the series so far. When I started the project of reading these I foolishly thought I could do one per week, that didn't quite pan out but my reading is indeed getting better and by the last 50 pages or so I don't think I made a single lookup which is probably the longest I've gone in a prose novel without one.

Unfortunately, this is one of the lesser Kuma Bear volumes, usually you've got a filler volume before a "main event" volume and this is an odd case where the filler volume before this one was more entertaining. Volume 9 gave us a fun little sidequest about trying to find an elf girl's bracelet and introduced the elf village, whereas Volume 10 is about a quarter action followed by a bunch of tedious narrative busywork.

I blasted through the first quarter in a day or so and though I could keep up the pace, but after the big fight with the evil tree the whole thing was basically Yuna cutting deals to put her house and portals around the village and cleaning things up after the battle. It's probably the weakest volume since volume 5 which had a lot of the same issues. I never thought I'd miss the "Yuna introduces a new food and shows it to literally everyone she knows" subplots but I think even one of those would have been more interesting.

Still, I do enjoy the characters and their interactions, and the playful teasing is always cute. The bonus chapters about Elelaura and Zerifu touring Crimonia while Yuna's out were probably the best part of the book and some of the better bonus chapters in general, along with a cute short about Noa finally meeting up with her mom after a while.

I think I need a week or two break from this series to catch up on some manga-reading, and that's tough because I feel like I've hit my stride with it in terms of reading ability, but at the same time the plotline in this one was so dull that it actually made it harder to push through even though I understood most of the words and sentences just fine. I still want to see these through, but hopefully something a bit more exciting awaits me in volume 11.