Reviews and Comments

There is a lot of the setting which is specific to Japan. The epilogue mentions some disturbing statistics about the mental health of Japanese middle school children, but there is also the tourist's pleasure of glimpsing bits of Japanese culture and geography half remembered from a previous visit.

The characters on the other hand are somehow universal underneath an exotic (to an outsider) interest in forms of address. The author does a great job of capturing the anxieties and traumas of not just the extreme cases, but the everyday challenges of growing up as the anxious and unpopular kid.

The plot is immanently spoilable, so I won't say much, except that there is a definite puzzle book here as well.

The book should probably come with a full suite of content warnings for (sensitive treatment of) child sexual assault, child death, and family member death. So although I can believe the claim that people find the book healing (it is ultimately very hopeful), the reader should know they are in for things and stuff before that healing arrives.

This book shares with many fantasy novels a roughly early modern European setting and main characters who are poor, somewhat principled criminals living on the margins of that setting (the latter also reminds me a bit of the author's portrayal of the economically marginalized in the Expanse as well) . There is an aspect of systematic racism in the world, where the poor people just happen to be be one ethnic minority and live on one side of the river. By magical realism I mean that while magical elements are important, the plot is mainly about more mundane things that might get nudged one way or the other by magic (or by luck). All of this is well and good (if not especially unusual in contemporary fantasy), but what made the book a bit more interesting for me was the way it played with the ideas of hero/antihero/main-character/supporting-character in interesting ways.