華麗なる探偵アリス&ペンギン

華麗なる探偵アリス&ペンギン is about an awkward, melancholy junior high student named Alice who goes to live with her father's old friend P.P. Junior, a detective who unexpectedly turns out to be a penguin. With the power of a mysterious ring, she can enter the Mirror World to transform into Alice Riddle and help P.P. catch criminals.

This book turned out to be surprisingly readable, only slightly harder than the Magic Tree House books despite being aimed at a junior high audience. Unlike younger children's books, it doesn't use hiragana instead of kanji for the hard words so you can get exposed to lots of kanji, but it still has full furigana so it's easy to look up new words. Sentences tend to be short, direct, and uncomplicated with few advanced grammar points. The book is divided into three short stories, each about 50-70 pages long — unfortunately there aren't many scene breaks, so it can be hard to find a good place to stop. The vocabulary is typical everyday ordinary stuff, though there's a lot of English names and loanwords in katakana.

The story itself was entertaining enough: it's basically a magical girl anime in a "crime of the week" story format, and the criminals are fairy tale characters such as Little Red Riding Hood. The mystery aspect of the stories is pretty weak, being mostly an excuse for the silly but likable characters to interact comedically. I liked how the main character is quite intelligent, just painstakingly slow, and one of the super powers she gets is to basically stop time so she can think things through carefully; I also appreciated that the other characters in the story like her just the way she is and never get frustrated with her awkwardness. So it's pleasant light reading, if you enjoy magical girls and fairy tale motifs.

Update June 2022: Having read the next few books in the series, I can tell you that the series continues on in pretty much exactly the same way and at the same difficulty level. So if you like the first novel, you will most likely enjoy the rest of the series as well.