バケモノたちが嘯く頃に ~バケモノ姫の家庭教師~

This was far too hard for my first novel, I read it in 1.5 years with frequent long breaks. When I was actually reading, I read about a chapter a week. At some point I realized I didn't really learn anything from it and quit it (at the time) for good. After doing some proper kanji study and reading other things for a few months I returned back to it and read the remaining 2 chapters in a few days.

All this to say, do not listen to people who tell you to just jump off the deep end.

Entertainment wise, this isn't ryukishis best, but not his worst either. It actually has a lot of potential, and an interesting topic. It touches on psychology, patient rights, the concept of thought crime and socieatal pressure, as well as a lot of focus on sexism.... however ultimately I don't feel it all comes together very well, and the ending was lackluster. There are also uncomfortable topic of a very young girl being seemingly in love with the adult mc (who doesn't explicitly reciprocate at least, but there were moments that seemed to imply it).

What makes this hard is that there is a lot of specific vocab to the topics discussed. For example it opens up with an overview of post-war japan and the situation in rural areas. Later there are discussions of small town politics and history, as well as global politics, medicine etc... As well as long sentences with few paragraph breaks.

This book in general reads more like a regular novel than other light novels I read (in english) which had very short paragraphs and a lot of dialogue.