きみの友だち

Story about a young girl, Emi, who is injured in a traffic accident and develops a friendship with a chronically ill schoolmate. Each chapter focuses on a different character, granting us a brief view into their personal story and how it intersects with Emi's, with each story generally exploring the theme of friendship in some way. How friendships start, how they grow, how they end, and the marks they leave on us.

I thought this was excellent with a very moving and rewarding ending, and would happily recommend it to people looking for something that sits outside of the LN/Manga sphere. Each of the stories feels very honest, natural and warm, and I'm sure many people would be able to relate to the scenarios presented here in some way or another.

At the time of writing Natively has this down as a Children's Book, but I'm not convinced it is despite this being about children. That being said, I do think this is a fairly approachable book for learners. The difficulty of the writing felt very manageable to me, with relatively little in the way of complicated grammar or convoluted sentences. The timeline does jump around a bit, and there are quite a few characters to keep track of, but the pseudo-short story collection approach means even if you don't fully understand one section it probably won't affect too much later on in the story. Some of the chapters have some more specialist vocabulary (usually medical), and there are a few instances of extended metaphor and other trickier bits, so I did think this was slightly harder than some of the 'easy' LNs I've read, but overall this is still probably fine for N3 level readers.