kat 🍓

3:

I don't know what I was expecting, but it wasn't that.

Well actually, I kinda do know. I'd read and enjoyed Convenience Store Woman, so I was gunning for weird, but cute and whimsical. Instead, I got smacked in the head by domestic abuse and pedophilia like, right at the beginning of the story. Yeah... the explicitness of the latter made me queasy, and I had half a mind to drop the book, but I kept going because I wanted Natsuki to kick everybody in the balls.

That last part was so bonkers though, I'm not too squeamish while reading, but I was cringing and curling my toes. I liked the tone and the underlying message, but geez that was almost comical; I laughed at the “we're all pregnant” comment.

Not my usual choice at all but I still want to read everything else by Sayaka.

Edit: oh my god and there was incest. I forgot about the incest.

DNF at 30%: I can't be bothered to enjoy something that brings up Google THIS much, and Clay is not an interesting enough character to make up for that in my books, I'm afraid.

4.5:

The children made some friends!! I might cry. Absolutely delighted at the introduction of the Quagmire triplets, after all the gloom and depression of the previous installment, this was like a breath of fresh air.

Once again, we were burdened with the usual Olaf shenanigans, an awful prick for a guardian, and clueless, no good Mr. Poe doing nothing once again. But I see a plot peeking around the corner! Isadora and Duncan went digging for dirt on Olaf, and it looks like they found something worth destroying their notebooks for — I wonder what that was about.

(Olaf making the children run laps for hours on end just might be the cruelest thing in the series so far. Also I despised Nero, but when he said Sunny was to be his secretary, I cackled for like, three straight minutes).

5:

Short and sweet, but it took me a month to finish it. Man, January sucked major ass. This was all, of course, because of my general state of mind and being, and not a fault of the story.

Even over a year after reading, it won't leave my soul. This little book lingers at the back of my mind at all times when I'm in need of comfort.

(There was an unspeakable act of animal cruelty that broke my heart, I feel that I must mention. Yikes!).

3:

This was terribly sad and unexpectedly violent. Rowan's feelings of rejection and the way she dealt with them were hard to witness, especially in the latter half of the book which for the most part left me unsettled.

I wish there had been a bit more character development, or that her relationship with her mom could have been improved somewhat, it seems to me that they stayed the same in the end regardless of everything that went down. But since this is semi-autobiographical, I can see why that may have been.