Specs
Reviews
(4.42/5)Enjoyable tearjerker
Difficulty: I listened to the audiobook for this and didn’t read the text. I found it one of the best books I’ve listened to so far in terms of feeling like I was missing almost nothing. The everyday setting of this means that there is almost no unusual vocab, and I’d say the grammar is pretty comfortably in the N3/maybe some N2 ballpark.
Story: I really enjoyed this story! The first three quarters or so are a quite simple but very charming high school romance (with a slight twist). The last quarter of the book is emotion packed and I couldn’t stop listening until I got to the end. I wasn’t totally satisfied with the ending on a plot/character level however it was very effective at making me feel lots of emotions! Recommend if you want to cry!
Sad. Very, very sad.
I'm not entirely sure how to make this book sound appealing without spoilers, so I just won't. Personally I'd even avoid reading the blurb, though the spoilers in there are minor. If you're into sad things and don't mind reading a romance novel, definitely give this a try. It's well written and among books that have a similar premise, it's by far the best one I've read to date. At first it doesn't seem that special, but past a certain point it's just heart-wrenching.
I listened to the audiobook for this one, for which the book is a good fit. It's easy, has a real life setting and even if you don't understand everything you should be able to follow what's going on. I am not the biggest fan of the narrator, since I liked the book so much I wish they had picked a better one, but overall the narration was still okay.
Beautiful, beautiful book
As others have said, the story starts off as a slightly surprising high school romance (but luckily, the usual school gossiping etc was kept at an extremely low level). Then some events start kicking in... The end result is a beautiful story about pure love. In hindsight, I might have liked the book even better without the very last chapter. In my opinion, it did not add much to the main message and started veering a bit towards the kitschy end, which the author had pretty much avoided up until then. But I liked it nonetheless.
Language-wise, I thought it was written in a very good style. There were no annoying repetitions or shallow phrases. Nonetheless, important words were repeated often enough to make them stick, and truly difficult passages were rare. While there was lots of dialogue, it never became too slangy or too hard to follow who was talking etc. Overall, language-wise this should be a good pick for an intermediate reader.