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(4/5)Basic plot: A man and a woman wake up without their memories. A teenage girl goes missing. A mysterious plot unfolds behind the scenes - how are these events connected? What is Level 7?
Content warnings: This book is over 600 pages so I may have forgotten some, but I recall references to sexual abuse, suicide, and murder.
Learning: This is one of 宮部みゆき's earlier works and quite accessible. It doesn't go as deep into social issues as her other books I've read, although there is a taste of it, and the vocabulary is pretty constrained.
I read this as a paperback (at this time there is no ebook version) and probably had to look something up in the dictionary ~5 times for the entire 600+ page book. YMMV of course! But if you have already read a decent number of novels, espcially crime/mystery novels, there is not much in the way of vocab here to throw you off.
Grammar is all very straight forward, no flowery turns of phrase, no dialectical speech.
Review: The fact that I read all 600 pages goes to show it's not bad, but I did feel that some scenes dragged, especially towards the end where everything was being explained/connected/wrapped up. The unfolding of events was exciting to discuss with the book club and because everything is held just out of reach of understanding for so long there's a lot to speculate about. The tension and progression of the story, especially in the first half, I thought was really well done. I looked forward to reading this book each week.
A mystery/thriller that I read as part of a little informal book club on the natively forum. This was a lot of fun, and I’m glad I read it as part of a group as it meant a steady pace through what was a long book so I didn’t either go too fast and burn myself out on it or stall out and move on to reading something else.
The first half of the book is really good -- the author sets up this "what could possibly be going on" scenario where a man and a woman wake up in an apartment with their memories gone, and then gradually as you read you get more information. The ending is not bad, but doesn't quite live up to the suspense of the main part of the book, and some of the explanations could perhaps have been condensed a bit.
The author's books are generally fairly easy to read as novels go, and this is no exception -- the difficulty is purely in the fact that at 700 pages it's a lot of text to read, I think.