I LOVE Weird fiction and second-hand embarrassment but couldn’t get past how this story is told. It made the most intriguing moments a snore fest.   

Energy: Amusing. Ludicrous. Impressionable.
Scene: 🇯🇵 Begins in a run-down park in Tokyo, Japan
Perspective: We follow our main character through middle school, high school, and a college music program. Our MC is tone-deaf, can’t read the room, and their family and peers avoid them. They aspire to be a singer and seek connection and friendship. 

🐺 Growls: Talking at us instead of letting us infer, experience, and observe. How boring this is. 
🐕 Howls: How long this felt. Dragging what could have been a curious short story into something too long. 

🤔 Random Thoughts:
I wanted to interrupt the narrator with Why Are You Telling Us This and Where Is This Going so many times. There were moments I loved, like dialogue or interactions that highlighted unlikeable cringe and awkwardness in such a visceral way, but they were sporadic and overshadowed by the narrator explaining why it’s cringe to us.

I couldn’t help but read most of this in a flat, monotone way. I think because shocking, bizarre, or horrific scenes were explained after the fact, and it ruined the vibe. Or right in the middle of an interesting/random/shocking scene, we’d be yanked out into a tangent of how Shiori really wants [insert thing here].

The ending and twist were indeed Weird, but still couldn’t keep my attention. If it was supposed to be symbolic, it was lost on me.

----
🎬 Tale-Telling: Wordy, dense stream of consciousness. Overly drawn-out philosophical dialogue between characters. Spoon-feeding bizarro tropes.
🤓 Reader Role: Sitting next to a stranger on a park bench as they tell us Shiori’s life story (literally).
🗺️ World-Building: Foreboding but barren. It could take place in just about any large city.
🔥 Fuel: Driven by character evolution and moral quandaries. It read like a third-person draft of Shiori’s memoir.
📖 Cred: Speculative ‘what if’
🚙 Journey: Excited for an event. Car dies in the middle of nowhere. Miss out on the event. Hear about it second-hand for months.

Mood Reading Match-Up:
-Rusty playground equipment. Child wailing. Parakeets chirping. Mall music. Electric guitars tuning up. Suitcase latches.
-Bizarro story-within-a-story soft sci-fi
-Socially isolated coming-of-age and new adult plots

Content Heads-Up: Physical and sexual assault, incestuous (sibling). Torture. Suicidal ideation. Rape (mention, rumours).  Loneliness. Rejection (family, peers). Animal death (birds, disease). Nuclear weapons.

Rep: Japanese. Cisgender. Heterosexual.

📚 Format: Advance Reader’s Copy from Pushkin Press and NetGalley.

My musings 💖 powered by puppy snuggles 🐶