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A charming but fairly uneventful story
Difficulty: I listened to the audiobook for this and didn’t read the text. As an audiobook listen it was mostly straightforward enough other than some dense descriptive sections when the characters enter new locations. I definitely was missing some vocab here and there which didn’t get in the way of me being able to follow what was happening and enjoy the story (especially it was mainly limited to those location descriptions) but someone that prefers to understand 100% might rate this higher than I felt it was. Depending on what you’ve read before, the dialogue of the cat character and some of the narration might take some getting used to as it’s written in a quite “old fashioned” style.
Story: I found this novel a bit of a weird one. It feels as though the author really wanted to write about how great books are and how they should be read/treated and the characters and plot were just kind of scaffolding around that.
Similarly to cats review, I think I would have really loved this book had I read it perhaps in my early teens but adult me wished for a bit more depth to the plot and characters. If you are looking for a novel that has ‘a point to make’ about how we live our life and the things that make it worthwhile I’d recommend 世界から猫が消えたなら or カラフル over this one as I think both feel more like complete stories. That said, the writing style of this novel is enjoyable and some of the characters (such as the talking cat) are pretty fun, so overall I still enjoyed it despite the above.