Lonely Castle in the Mirror by Mizuki Tsujimura

This book is super odd.

It took me a while to boil down my thoughts on this one.

The story itself is very good and feels like a Ghibli story.  It is originally written in Japanese, by a Japanese author, for a Japanese audience. This is a very important note to make, because...

It was very difficult for me to get into this book.

I could not for the life of me keep the characters straight or relate to their struggles or choices in any capacity. It is very telling that the students act in accordance with Japanese customs and social norms, but that does not transfer well as a reader since I do not live in that culture. 

This culture clash is exasperated by the fact that this story is very character driven. By 40% in, nothing had happened yet, and all the story was, was minor interactions between the 7 main characters.  

A character centric book in this regard has always been a struggle for me. I am awful at remembering who is who, and frequently glaze over when it comes time to remember a character unless they've done something memorable. 🤷‍♀️ I am simply a story driven reader, not a character driven reader. However this was made infinitely more difficult due culture clash happening. This is not a problem everyone will face, I'm sure. For me, it took a task I'm already trash at and cranked the difficulty up to 11.

I DNFed at aroud 50%. I was simply not feeling the teenage demographic, or the difficulty in understanding a character driven story with the added complication of cultural neuances.

This has a lot of promise as an amazing book, but I have accepted that I am not the target audience, and will be moving on.