A beautifully illustrated graphic novel with lovable characters who are on an unexpected adventure!

Unfortunately, the story itself was very confusing and needed a bit more explanation. Hopefully the darkness and prophecy will be fully explored in future books though!

Altogether this series holds promise but the introduction didn't 'wow' me like I'd hoped it would.

absolutely beautiful illustrations, but very confusing storytelling. i’m honestly not entirely sure what i just read…

A perfectly balanced adventure. Never too silly or too dark. I eagerly await the second volume. 

I'm a bit confused about what I just read. On one hand this is a story of growing up and friendship with themes like bullying and the classic mythic setting of getting rid of/returning a malevolent artifact which tries to get it's malicious ideas into the bearer's head; drawn in a style that is extremely cute and dreamy but also well fitting for the darker parts as well, and the palette is amazing.
On the other hand two things are really confusing. One of them is the high contrast between the lighthearted storyline of Haru and Yama (it has serious topics like bullying and betrayal but all of these are handled very lightly, fitting for the middle grade audience) and the storyline of the opposing evil entity which starts extremely abstract right at the beginning. I guess much of the confusion about the relations and intentions of this entity are due to this being a first installment in a series, but the level of abstractedness was challenging my comprehension as an adult.
The other part of the confusion relates to the setting, which is so confusing that most of the time I don't even know if it's supposed to be random, a world without rules or haphazard rules or actually supposed to make sense. I assume this would get clearer in later installments (the very least a confirmation if we need to look for rules at all or not) but it was a quite detaching experience that you can never know if something that looks strange for the reader is also strange for the characters, or just some of the characters, is it familiar or odd, is it common knowledge or a secret, etc. Often it made me more frustrated than interested.
But I'm conflicted about my opinion because some parts are really touching and I hope that everything that looks detached at the moment will conclude into an epic web of meaning and emotion by the end of the series (I hope for a similar arc like e.g. Over the Garden Wall is built).

Thank you NetGalley, the artist and the publisher for providing the ARC. Opinions are my own.

Beautiful and magical illustrations. Writing quality felt inconsistent throughout the novel but a really lovely read.