The story of of a girl being sucked into books to find a thief is why I picked up this novel. I thought the whole book would be about that, and it sort of is but sorry of isn't.
The first three chapters feel episodic (a very Japanese story telling troupe) with Mifuu going into a new book each time to catch the thief. So there wasn't much to motivate me to keep reading. But after chapter three, things got a lot more interesting and I found myself storming through the novel to a satisfying ending.
The book wants to be read like a movie, with different visual effects which are distracting. The characters aren't fleshed out properly either, there's not one character we fully get to know - except for the mean grandmother who is the last character we wish to know better - and it feels like the whole story could have been half in length if not for all the "book excerpts". In addition, the content of these excerpts has barely to do anything with the main story, they're just distracting, almost boring. It was hard to jump back and forth from the main storyline to the story of these "short stories" . It feels like the author wanted to write in many different genres, couldn't decide which one to pick, and smashed all of them together. Not to mention the logic of the events is a tad hard to follow and everything is either spelled out for the reader or not explained at all just when it's so late and we don't care about it anymore . The idea of the book is really good with much much potential but the pace is off and I think it could have been executed way better overall. . I would have loved to learn more about the shrine too and its connection to everything, the curse itself, not to mention what happened how, and why - and not just in the last 25% of the book. However, the last 10-15% did make up for it all to some extent, so I'm gonna settle on 3.5 ☆.
-- for einglish Mystery fantasy? When a book is stolen, both the protagonist and the city are transformed into the world of the book's story. The book itself is a fantasy, and the reader is drawn into the book, but the reader who takes the place of the main character in the book is drawn even further into the world of the book! A very interesting experience! Interesting!