[DeepL Translation - needs review] 'With the girl in the faraway land pictured here.
We are the same.
Yes, we are the discriminated ones.
It's hard to admit, but the more I learn about the facts
The more I know the facts, the more power I have to break through it. and the more I learn about it, the more I feel empowered.
Mariko Yamauchi, writer
"I feel ashamed of this world, and it's a shameful thing.
But it's even more shameful not to know.
I won't stop turning the pages.
I will not be defe...
This is a lovely series of five vignettes about 10-year-old girls in five countries, all centered around the idea of the cultural limitations imposed on girls and women (mostly but not entirely with regard to education). It's fairly basic feminism - but that doesn't stop the stories from being interesting, and those ideas like 'it's okay for women to not be married' and 'girls should go to school' are still things that need to be fought for.
The stories mostly feature the girls running into these issues with their older relatives, and they do a good job of showing how women can both reject anti-feminist ideals and absorb them to their own detriment. They also show some of the knock-on effects of things like not being allowed to go to school; in one story, a girl imagines what it's like to be illiterate like her grandmother, and how that not only robbed her of the pleasure of reading, but also makes the world scarier and hard, even dangerous, to navigate. In another, a girl is confronted with what kinds of male behavior women will justify and go along with with in a culture where it's nearly impossible for widows to remarry. These encounters invite the girls to imagine how their futures can be freer.
Spoilery content note for one story: forced prostitution (nothing is shown on page or graphically discussed)
The art style is stark but nicely drawn, and it fit well with the tone of the story. The one thing I didn't like was that in a couple of places, characters didn't appear to have moved but were starting a new scene, which was briefly confusing.
Language-wise: grammar is generally very simple, with only a few longer sentences that might be confusing. Vocabulary is also generally simple, and much of it relates to school. The one thing I ran into is that my ebook copy (purchased via Rakuten/Kobo) was slightly blurry; there is only one instance of furigana, and it was almost too blurry to read.