Reviews
(4/5)What makes this a good beginner book in my opinion:
- For a kid's book, pretty normal Kanji usage with Furigana
- Short stories that are all pretty similar in terms of vocabulary
- Many of the core terms easy to guess, so you don't need to specifically learn those (レズビアン -> Lesbian)
I thought it was very easy, the vocab is very repetitive (people mostly talk about gender, either in a sense that they love the same gender or in a sense that they aren’t their assigned gender) and it is mostly in a school setting. The only thing I struggled with was very specific school types (in the first story she goes on to study biochemistry I think?) but honestly I could’ve just ignored those words.
The stories usually go like someone is queer and feeling isolated by not knowing other queer people or their friends/family not accepting them. Or about them coming out and being afraid of the reactions. The non fiction nature of this book makes it fairly guessable even if you only understand parts of the sentence.
One thing I liked about this book was that we were allowed to see how different characters felt and expressed their sexuality and gender. Even if they were all part of the LGBTQ+ community, did they have different experiences. For example: some characters already knew at the beginning of the story that they were queer, while others figured it out during the story. I did find the book a little repetitive though about halfway through, since the majority of the stories did follow a similar structure, but it wasn’t all of them, and it wasn’t enough to bore me.
The book used a lot of common words, and the “special” vocabulary for this book (words that are specific for the themes in the book, LGBTQ+ terms) were mostly English loanwords in katakana. There is also a dictionary at the end of the book with a few of these terms both in Japanese and English, with a short description in Japanese.
My biggest problem with this book was the lack of kanji (which is quite common in children’s books, so not a specific thing for this one). Sometimes there were whole sentences written in hiragana, which sometimes made it hard to know where words started/ended. A few names were also written in hiragana only, which made it even hard to read sometimes since the name would “melt” together with all the other hiragana. Apart from that, I found the language manageable, there were a few words that I didn’t know, but also didn’t feel like I needed to know to understand the story, so I didn’t look them up…
Overall, an interesting book. Probably not the most entertaining book I have read, but it was really interesting and probably a book whose contents I will carry with me for a long time.