Book review post (no spoilers):
...
Read the 384 pages well~~ in four days.
The language is easy and the flow is fine. I fear that I am missing quite a bit of important context provided by the author throughout the book, because I am not familiar at all with the pop culture references. Many book titles are mentioned especially in the first half of the book, where the feelings of the main-nim could probably be better understood if one knew the mentioned books. Similarly in the second half many song titles are used like that.
Some things I liked:
- the author manages to switch from seemingly casual dialogue between the characters to meaningful background story incredibly well again and again. You won't notice that you got sucked into a 40 page flashback kind of backstory, or if you do notice, then the plot will advance again with dialogue or even fast-forwarding, so you won't get bored.
- the important characters are brought to life quickly and they all have their niche. I think anime readers will find some patterns and feel right at home with the characters. At least it was like that for me.
- the story doesn't drag on too long.
Some things I didn't like:
- All throughout the book, the author manages to build up intimate moments of magic, where you left your thinking brain behind and the feels can flow. However these moments are so often disturbed by the language he uses in dialogues. I don't know if this is just a translation issue or what. The language is often crass and vulgar. He uses words like "wank", "cunt", "pussy", "fuck", "arsehole", "donkey shit". Which imo is completely unnecessary and even bad for the story. It oftentimes yanked me out of a moment of developing feels and made me think "eh? the fuck am I reading".
Especially the sexual natured words seem out of character, because he manages to describe sexual scenes in a way as you'd expect completely without vulgarities or overly graphic language elsewhere in the book a few times just fine.
- the topic of sex comes up and is often the focus throughout the book beginning to end. I don't mind the parts about the attraction between the characters at all and sex naturally belongs there too, but then there is the specifically degenerate sex stuff with the different language as said previously. I thought more than once that I'm reading something written by a dude who was horny at the time and had to insert that into the book for no other reason. This did not bother me much with the character Midori, since with her it sort of fits and is okay. But with the maingeol Naoko it is utterly unbelievable for me that she would EVER do such things or use words like that. The language he sometimes used violated her character for me in a way
- There are a few places where the author inserts political stuff in a very childish and pointless way I thought. He let's the main-nim describe and talk about "the damn fascists" or midori-chan rant about "the hypocritical retarded marxists" way too often. I wouldn't care about this if it was just some remark once or twice, but especially the word fascist is just used as a childish substitution for the word bad, without actually making any political point one way or the other. I wouldn't mind if the whole story was political, but this is as if you'd insert a 10 minute dialogue about the green climate change agenda into a twilight movie. It's an adult love story and that's enough, mr author-nim...
Conclusion:
All in all I like the book. 8/10 Certainly made me feel. Even though you can kind of guess how the plot will go concerning the characters, the developments still always make a big impact in a way that was not expected.
I have additional + and - points relating to the plot, but that would be a spoiler so I left those out.