かくりよの宿飯 二 あやかしお宿で食事処はじめます。

Excellent Sequel!

This was an excellent book! I absolutely adore Aoi - she's very relatable and likable. I love her and 大旦那様's dynamic - it's funny and cute and checking all of my boxes! I also liked all of the side characters - Ginji, お涼, Kasuga, Ataksuki, Ritsuko, 白夜、and the writer guy were great. The continued world-building was also very interesting.

From a Japanese learning perspective, this was definitely easier than the first book, which was my fourth book in Japanese. In contrast, this book was my tenth, and I found it significantly easier and more pleasant to read. The writing style verges towards the more literary in my opinion, and the words I looked up were on the low-frequency side of things (ex: みずみずしい、容赦、謀る).

Overall, this was a wonderful book that I am very happy to have read. It was even stronger than the (very good) first book, and I greatly look forward to continuing the series! 5 stars.