Specs
Reviews
(2.75/5)General thematic warnings: suicide, murder
Basic opening plot: A girl's mother runs off with another man and commits suicide. A few years later her father is considering remarrying, and she bumps into the son of the "other man".
Language notes and review: Nothing special for vocab aside from a very small number of plot specific words. Pretty standard grammar, I'd guess N3 would have you covered. Written in a very straightforward manner. This was actually easier than the other two 赤川 books I've read before. The scenes generally felt sparser in description and sentences simpler. I didn't like it as much as I was expecting to given how much I enjoyed the other books, but it wasn't a bad book either. I think if you are breaking into novels it'd be a good choice since it's quite short and 95%+ of the vocabulary is normal words used in most books and the plot is engaging enough. If you are a seasoned reader you can pass unless you're looking for a lazy Saturday type of book. It has a very YA novel feel, the sort of thing I recall reading in upper elementary school - overly convenient circumstances, simplistic 1-dimensional feeling characters, but with a relatively quick moving story to keep young attention spans held.
My edition does have weird formatting with two rows of short columns per page instead of the usual long columns. Not sure if other editions are the same or if an ebook would have it too.
Easy read, but the story wasn't great
The grammar and vocabulary weren't so difficult, and I think the level shown for the book is appropriate.
The story itself wasn't particularly good. It starts out like it's going to be a murder mystery book, or at the very least it emphasized that there was something strange surrounding the suicide events at the beginning of the story, but the book loses a lot of the mystery elements and becomes more of a family drama. Events in the story and characters actions had little interconnection. The reveals as the story progressed were disappointing.