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check out the guidebook if you like the series
I love reading these books. It is just at the sweet spot for my Japanese level, and therefore, as a series, it opens up quite a fun way for me to read more and more easily. Each book broadens the world just a little bit, has enough predictable elements to keep it easy, and enough unpredictable elements to keep it fun. It's nice that the stories include both children and adults, and it felt more interesting as an adult reading for that.
Level: I believe these are targeted at 3-4th graders, because kanji is shown consistently through the 4th grade level (higher level kanji is generally just kana). 1st-2nd grade kanji/words have no furigana at all. 3rd-4th grade kanji have furigana on the first appearance per page. So if you know ~300 kanji or more at the start you're probably covered. And even if you haven't covered all of the kanji, 1st-2nd grade kanji are all very common kanji and generally even if I hadn't studied a few already they were easy to recognise or guess.
The audiobooks for this series are well done and are great practice for getting a better feeling for the mimetic words, since those tend to get more inflection.
Also, I wanted to draw people's attention to the guidebook (book 16 in this series), because if you're going to use it, it's best value if you start it from book 1 or 2 and if you think you'll continue with the series. I wrote a detailed review to give some insights on what's inside since it's not obvious.