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Cute and entertaining story, lovely characters and small vocabulary challenges
Entertainment: I was a little worried before starting the book and when you start reading full books you prerty much have to go with children's books and they can be either dull or boring or too childish but I was very pleasantly surprised with ひびき's story ! It is entertaining and the story keeps evolving quickly so that you want to keep on reading. At one point I was quite moved and the story got emotional and that was unexpected, well written and refreshing! What I really enjoy in that the book is divided 4 narrative "arcs", each with new plots and characters, and the chapters are pretty short making it easy to have small reading sessions without being overwhelmed even if it's the first book you read. The great thing too is that the story revolves around Japanese folklore and creatures which makes it even more interesting!
Language learning: Overall the vocabulary and grammar used throughout the book is not too challenging and a N3 level should allow you to go through it without struggling too much. There's a few challenges though, the first one being the mentions of Japanese folklore ghosts stories and entities which could sometimes make it harder to follow along. And the second one is the use (quite often) of "childish" alternative versions of 擬声語 and 擬音語 that would not appear in dictionaries or even in Google searches. Some examples could be the use of ぴょこたん (instead of ぴょこぴょこ), とんとこ (to mean とんとん, or ぽむん etc etc... if you are like me and want to check the meaning of all the words you do not know you can lose quite some time and these ones !
Overall: I would definitely recommend this one for your first or second book as you'll still learn a lot of basic and common words and verbs, grammar is easy and sentences are short. You might stumble upon some specific vocabulary here and there but nothing too bad or preventing global comprehension. While doing that you'll be entertained and will learn about traditional Japanese ghosts stories and creatures, you'll get attached to the characters and will be able to enjoy small reading sessions!