March 2, 2022

General thematic warnings: suicide, murder

Basic opening plot: A girl's mother runs off with another man and commits suicide. A few years later her father is considering remarrying, and she bumps into the son of the "other man".

Language notes and review: Nothing special for vocab aside from a very small number of plot specific words. Pretty standard grammar, I'd guess N3 would have you covered. Written in a very straightforward manner. This was actually easier than the other two 赤川 books I've read before. The scenes generally felt sparser in description and sentences simpler. I didn't like it as much as I was expecting to given how much I enjoyed the other books, but it wasn't a bad book either. I think if you are breaking into novels it'd be a good choice since it's quite short and 95%+ of the vocabulary is normal words used in most books and the plot is engaging enough. If you are a seasoned reader you can pass unless you're looking for a lazy Saturday type of book. It has a very YA novel feel, the sort of thing I recall reading in upper elementary school - overly convenient circumstances, simplistic 1-dimensional feeling characters, but with a relatively quick moving story to keep young attention spans held.

My edition does have weird formatting with two rows of short columns per page instead of the usual long columns. Not sure if other editions are the same or if an ebook would have it too.

Gradings:11
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cat graded
on March 16, 2024
similar in difficulty to幽霊終着駅L28
cat graded
on December 30, 2022
cat graded
on March 2, 2022
easier thanコンビニ人間L30
cat graded
on March 2, 2022
easier thanかがみの孤城L28
cat graded
on March 2, 2022
cat graded
on March 2, 2022
cat graded
on March 2, 2022
similar in difficulty toDear FriendsL25
cat graded
on March 2, 2022
harder than時をかける少女L24
cat graded
on March 2, 2022
cat graded
on March 2, 2022
cat graded
on March 2, 2022