Brilliant idea for a short story well executed. The story itself feels like a lot of short stories to me. Not much to chew on and huge swaths of time with rushed characterization. The idea is the thing here, and it more than succeeds off the back of it.

This is a dark horse, and I like dark horses. It shows the challenges and lack of options immigrants have and flies directly in the face of the model minority examination that most fiction tends to do. Instead Ivy’s parents are shown to put immense pressure on her due to their social privilege and indoctrination of family status and values, and a premium on wealth because they don’t have the ability to accrue it, which creates the circumstances that put Ivy on a course that is, essentially, predetermined.

Luxury is not merely material goods and sustenance, though that is reiterated a lot throughout, but also the ability to choose and see a path forward, based on upbringing and station. Pivotally, when Ivy does finally put together pieces peppered throughout regarding one of the most important decisions in her life, she has become so skewed that the path forward is the same choices her family has had to made, which can really only end with continuing a trauma cycle.

But neither is the reader supposed to be overtly sympathetic with Ivy while she continues numerous condemnable actions, just understand why they are happening, even as it’s obfuscated from the character herself.

In short, it’s one of those novels where you will either enjoy watching unlikable characters unfold like train wrecks, or you won’t. In particular, her inability to perceive something so obvious about a man she ends up seeing, and the fruition of that outcome, I think really drives home the themes of the novel—but it is quite literally the very last thing that occurs, making it a very slow burn (which I don’t mind, but some may).

This book is better in most ways than the previous two. There are stakes that seem more real, demons become more nuanced, and the relationship between the chickens is slightly more deepened.

There’s still some cringe stuff too, though. In the first volume there’s a demon that appears to be cross dressing and it’s weirdly shamed and killed, there’s humour revolving around the rooster fighter and wanting to jump every chicken he sees, which goes into weird sexual assault territory that always ends up being skirted because they’re animals, trying to keep some anthromorphization and shirk other aspects. It’s clearly very silly off the jump. A rooster that fights demons where humans seem to do nothing at all, but it’s still mostly just fun at it’s very best, and nothing more than that. Why it makes peoples’ top manga of all time, kind of makes me unenthusiastic to check out more from those lists, tbh.

This feels less punchy than the first instalment, necessarily circumnavigating back to what small plot details revealed before, and that retreading is more annoying when you read them in a bind-up. It’s still hypnotic and mostly captivating, but I feel like this barely sated my interest and want for a step forward in the meat of the narrative.

Time keeps on slipping, just as it did before. And we do get more back story about the things he kept refusing to think about. But all in all, there’s like three events, versus kind of a lot that happens (it felt like) before.

Well, it’s better than Rooster Fighter, I’ll give it that. It’s quirky, the art is fantastic, the backstory makes the main character sympathetic, and the world is semi-interesting. Because it’s Shonen the guy is a naive horny teenager of course, but the women seem against type, which gives me some hope. I’d give it another volume because the fights are cool. It’s possible Rooster Fighter bombed my expectations for these best ever manga lists, and this is benefiting from that, but at the very least this is cooler.

All of these people are varying degrees of bad. From slightly narcissistic to irredeemable and vile. However, the strange, almost Pushing Daisies-esk quality to the narration. Spinning a yarn, but it’s biting and unwilling to let the characters off the hook. Which is good, considering what happens to Patrick Melrose in this book at the age of 5.

It won’t be for everyone. It’s traumatic, and looks to be teeing up Patrick’s future in a way that probably examines the trauma cycle. This is particular to my interests and the voice and prose is really well done, so it was for me, but I can see why probably most people wouldn’t be interested in it. I think it will only be more interesting when it moved past his childhood. We’ll see what happens.

There’s a case for reading them with time apart and a case for reading them at once. The reiteration of events do feel stilted because they feel like a recap that stands out, rather than the influx of memories that are relived, probably as a trauma response. They feel apart from it for the only reason of signalling to the reader that they should remember them, because it’s about to be expounded on.

It also, I think, mostly denies a lot of catharsis, despite learning quite a bit. Some things are never explained, though they’re dwelled on constantly. And I suppose just with the writing style there’s a heavy bit of solipsism that begs a few questions. Mostly, the strength is in the unique style of delivery and the melding of conveying philosophical underpinnings and characterization. There’s a lot of form meeting function that telegraph so much about the character. The reader knows so much more about them than they do themselves, which rings very true, to me. How well can you know yourself without input from other people? How much can you make out and what do you construe in your own little locked room? What are your own paths trampled down in the wilderness of your mind, unconsciously taking you through the same way, time after time again?

There is a pretty satisfying, deeper explanation for how and why the thoughts are arranged and continually looped around to in this one, which makes it the most compelling of the three. The pontification on art and peripheral critiques of it were interesting as well, even if the plot goes in a direction I didn’t expect and, even more than the last, is a book where not much happens. Probably, you’re down with that if you’ve made it to the third book, unless you’re reading the bind-up, which I am doing for the last two books, having started the first a while back.

There’s a case for reading them with time apart and a case for reading them at once. The reiteration of events do feel stilted because they feel like a recap that stands out, rather than the influx of memories that are relived, probably as a trauma response. They feel apart from it for the only reason of signalling to the reader that they should remember them, because it’s about to be expounded on.

It also, I think, mostly denies a lot of catharsis, despite learning quite a bit. Some things are never explained, though they’re dwelled on constantly. And I suppose just with the writing style there’s a heavy bit of solipsism that begs a few questions. Mostly, the strength is in the unique style of delivery and the melding of conveying philosophical underpinnings and characterization. There’s a lot of form meeting function that telegraph so much about the character. The reader knows so much more about them than they do themselves, which rings very true, to me. How well can you know yourself without input from other people? How much can you make out and what do you construe in your own little locked room? What are your own paths trampled down in the wilderness of your mind, unconsciously taking you through the same way, time after time again?

Fast-paced and often melodramatic, this combines a mystery with a medical drama, and a dollop of pretty heavy handed social commentary. The real hook is the mystery though, seeing him being groomed by the head of hospital and his daughter was not nearly as interesting as the mysterious deaths and strange twins saved by him, which go missing.

Every aspect of it leans into the melodrama, however, so if you’re not keen on that, probably move on. Even the quirky detective has a strange bent to him. His Sherlock-esk memory palace seems to be stored in a muscle memory type way, where he imagines himself typing on a computer, his fingers twitching during conversations, as he is able to recall or put down information in his “files”.

I like the artwork most of the time, but the panelling is really exceptional. The only major reason it isn’t a four star read is down to the dialogue being stilted and the pacing being really, really slow. The world building also matches the pacing, presumably for the sake of its mystery, but after almost 300 pages very little is added as to what the heck the tower actually is, among other major things. Enough fun and cool things happen that it was a good read, but it doesn’t feel like a whole lot was thought through at a macro, editorial level, which makes sense, since it’s a bindup of a webtoon.