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Characterization is a Mess.
With the basic excuse of "we grew up and apart off screen" + "some evil magic guy is possessing people", the characters fail to engage in meaningful communication and every attempt at doing such is shot in the foot. This book is watching everything get worse for 8 chapters in a really repetitive manner, and then speedrunning the conclusion and pretending there's no trauma from these events afterwards.
Narrative is first person from Hibiki, which also makes everything seem exponentially like her fault. Various things from the show that seem like they could be useful or relevant are forgotten. You get the sense that this book didn't actually want to be a magical girl book but some experimental sink-into-despair horror.
Language learning wise, there's a few scenes that are less straightforward in terms of time, speaker, and location (hence my "experimental" comment). That at least is good practice for parsing what the heck is going on with less direct narrative styles.
Chapter by chapter commentary can be found on my blog.