That Blue Sky Feeling’s happy BL vibes and soft art style drew me in, and I can’t say I’m disappointed! What a cute story! This review covers the whole manga. 

Noshiro may be the new kid at his high school, but he’s had no trouble making friends. The lonely one is Sanada, who has been lurking in the corner growing mushrooms since middle school. Curious, Noshiro proclaims that he and Sanada will become besties. What follows is a soft, adorable manga about a young man questioning his identity and relationships after meeting his first queer person.

As someone who was once in Noshiro’s shoes, That Blue Sky Feeling is a highly relatable manga. With the round lines and abundance of circles, the art style is as wholesome as a hug. The plot is low-stakes, and the slice-of-life themes center friendship and being kind to those who are different. While I was frustrated that Noshiro backslid in his feminism during the second volume, I found his struggles very realistic. It takes time and effort to unlearn heteronormativity. The most surprising thing was that Sanada’s ex-boyfriend is an adult man. That relationship is a hard sell in the USA, with our rising neo-puritanism and Christian fundamentalism, but that’s on us, not Okura-san. I wasn’t squicked out. The older man acted more like a mentor than a boyfriend. Also fat characters! Fat characters who aren’t told to lose weight! Fat characters who are described as attractive! YESSSSSSS.

At three volumes, That Blue Sky Feeling is a quick, feel-good story about Noshiro coming into his own. Treat yourself to it! 

That Blue Sky Feeling’s happy BL vibes and soft art style drew me in, and I can’t say I’m disappointed! What a cute story! This review covers the whole manga. 

Noshiro may be the new kid at his high school, but he’s had no trouble making friends. The lonely one is Sanada, who has been lurking in the corner growing mushrooms since middle school. Curious, Noshiro proclaims that he and Sanada will become besties. What follows is a soft, adorable manga about a young man questioning his identity and relationships after meeting his first queer person.

As someone who was once in Noshiro’s shoes, That Blue Sky Feeling is a highly relatable manga. With the round lines and abundance of circles, the art style is as wholesome as a hug. The plot is low-stakes, and the slice-of-life themes center friendship and being kind to those who are different. While I was frustrated that Noshiro backslid in his feminism during the second volume, I found his struggles very realistic. It takes time and effort to unlearn heteronormativity. The most surprising thing was that Sanada’s ex-boyfriend is an adult man. That relationship is a hard sell in the USA, with our rising neo-puritanism and Christian fundamentalism, but that’s on us, not Okura-san. I wasn’t squicked out. The older man acted more like a mentor than a boyfriend. Also fat characters! Fat characters who aren’t told to lose weight! Fat characters who are described as attractive! YESSSSSSS.

At three volumes, That Blue Sky Feeling is a quick, feel-good story about Noshiro coming into his own. Treat yourself to it! 

That Blue Sky Feeling’s happy BL vibes and soft art style drew me in, and I can’t say I’m disappointed! What a cute story! This review covers the whole manga. 

Noshiro may be the new kid at his high school, but he’s had no trouble making friends. The lonely one is Sanada, who has been lurking in the corner growing mushrooms since middle school. Curious, Noshiro proclaims that he and Sanada will become besties. What follows is a soft, adorable manga about a young man questioning his identity and relationships after meeting his first queer person.

As someone who was once in Noshiro’s shoes, That Blue Sky Feeling is a highly relatable manga. With the round lines and abundance of circles, the art style is as wholesome as a hug. The plot is low-stakes, and the slice-of-life themes center friendship and being kind to those who are different. While I was frustrated that Noshiro backslid in his feminism during the second volume, I found his struggles very realistic. It takes time and effort to unlearn heteronormativity. The most surprising thing was that Sanada’s ex-boyfriend is an adult man. That relationship is a hard sell in the USA, with our rising neo-puritanism and Christian fundamentalism, but that’s on us, not Okura-san. I wasn’t squicked out. The older man acted more like a mentor than a boyfriend. Also fat characters! Fat characters who aren’t told to lose weight! Fat characters who are described as attractive! YESSSSSSS.

At three volumes, That Blue Sky Feeling is a quick, feel-good story about Noshiro coming into his own. Treat yourself to it! 

Yes, I picked up Midaregami because of Bungo Stray Dogs. There were some additional reasons. Second, my local library had a copy, so why not. Third, Yosano-san is considered something of a queer icon by the modern sapphic Japanese community, and I’m always down to learn more queer history.

Kobayashi-san, Reichhold-san, and Yuhki-san’s introduction to A Girl with Tangled Hair is solid and accessible to those new to her work and the larger genre, like me. They explain what a tanka is and patiently contextualize Yosano-san’s poems. Her work is seminal for both Japanese tanka and literature as a whole. She was a master of the craft. Her poems are full of female sexuality and carnal yearning, which shocked the public. Previous to her, women in poetry were mostly objects and/or mothers. Nobody, especially not a female poet, had considered breasts as an erogenous zone. Past the boob and into the heart, many of her poems draw from her life, the going’s on of the poetry scene, and how she very much wanted to get railed. Knowing about her life adds extra spice to the poems, and the front matter duly includes a biography, “Cast of Characters,” and timeline of the affair. Midaregami’s 399 tanka specifically chronicle her journey to marrying Yosano Tekkan-san.

Obviously the poems are amazing. I wrote several down in a little notebook and shared them with my friends. The poems are, at times, melodramatic and high-strung; full of yearning, and brimming with melancholia. Yet they’re always evocative and beautiful. I seem to have stumbled upon a controversy re: Yosano-san’s queerness. I’ve linked below two essays on the subject. The short version is that Yosano-san’s poetry lends to a queer reading, and the modern queer community has found themselves in her work. Yosano-san herself never explicitly stated she was queer, and she and her editors may (or may not) have gone to great lengths to obscure any sapphic longing. This edition's editors call Yosano-san and her maybe partner Tomiko-san “great friends.” The poems have been rearranged out of timeline order many times, by both Yosano-san and others. Despite the front matter’s emphasis on how autobiographical the tanka are, I found it distracting and impossible to figure out the chronology of the poems or follow a consistent emotional thread. Playing detective decreased my enjoyment. I recommend just going with the flow.

Taken as they are, the tanka paint a tantalizing picture and set up a mirror to my experience as a bisexual woman. Some of the tanka praise Tomiko-san and Tekkan-san’s beauty, passion, and wit. In one, Yosano-san expresses a cheerful shiver at feeling Tomiko-san’s cold feet in bed (highly relatable!). Others display a fierce protectiveness of both people, especially Tomiko-san, which gains poignancy knowing Tomiko-san died much too soon. My favorite section was Shirayui or “White Lily,” because it focused more on the tentative triad’s relationship. At the time of writing, lilies weren’t associated with sapphic love, but they sure are now. Despite the obfuscations done by the poet herself and others besides, these do feel like queer poems.

Overall, I really enjoyed A Girl with Tangled Hair and want to read more! Yosano-san was a fascinating woman who broke ground on a genre. 

 Nippon – Your Doorway to Japan’s essay “A Poet For All Seasons: Yosano Akiko and Same-Sex Love” by Janine Beichman: https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-topics/b09011/

Making Queer History’s essay “Yosano Akiko”: https://www.makingqueerhistory.com/articles/2020/4/15/yosano-akiko 

We made it to the final book in the Bone Witch Trilogy! Despite my enjoyment of the previous two books, The Shadow Glass felt like the weakest of the trilogy. That’s mostly due to the continuing dual timeline and how Tea uses her hard-won Shadow Glass. 

While the dual timeline worked well in the past, in Shadow Glass it felt more forced upon the story, rather than the best tool to tell Tea’s triumph. Instead of being excited to find out how point A arrives at point B, I felt impatient and sometimes confused. The time difference between the Bard and the Tea is incredibly miniscule. If I remember rightly, the time difference starts as a couple months and narrows to a couple days. The short gap made the time split feel artificial to the narrative, and any reveals would have had the same amount of twist and tension with a story in chronological order. The most confusing part was during the dual battle sequences. The same characters fought in the past and the present in short order, and I literally gave up figuring out anything besides who won. I understand Chupeco wanting all three books to have the same format, but Shadow Glass needs a much bigger, longer plot, and consequently older characters, to warrant the use.

What truly soured me to Shadow Glass was the ending.

Tea uses Shadow Glass to delete magic from the world, in the same of “equality.” Her thinking was that magic gives gifted people unfair advantage over the ungifted. Better to take away the gifts so nobody is special. It’s the equality of a blunt instrument, of a black and white thinker, of the selfish and vainglorious who dare not dwell on their consequences. Yanno, those people who opine that we’re all the same, and would erase, flatten, and violently assimilate minority populations. This “solution” is so incredibly naïve that I thought my audiobook file had gotten corrupted or something catastrophic had gone down to force Chupeco to write that. Listen. Magic may be dangerous, but the entire Eight Kingdoms healthcare system relies on it. Licht needed magic to reform her body to what her mental image of her body is. Infrastructure, water sanitation, and food supply depend on magic in this world. Hundreds died in the war, but thousands must have died without magic to support them. Wouldn’t it be better to create a robust legal system so magic users who harm others are brought to the same justice as everyone else? Offer free ethics classes? Campaign to end the weird ass child soldier program? Tea’s decision catapulted me out of the story and left me wondering if she is, after all, a villain.

Outside of the ending and dual timeline, I really enjoyed the book. Chupeco nailed the love themes. All types of love continue to have equal narrative weight and value. Love motivates heroes, villains, and nobodies. Licht’s coming out storyline was a special delight, and how she takes her identity at her own pace was great. I think I will still point to The Bone Witch Trilogy as a solid example of Young Adult high fantasy, but the ending is worth an asterisk. I’m excited for Chupeco’s other work and will put on my TBR!

The English Understand Wool was a Christmas gift from my Dad. Helen DeWitt is outside my usual genre fiction milieu, and it was pleasant to step out for such a delightful literary novella.

When seventeen year old Marguerite finds out that her parents are not who they said they are, her first priority is to react with good taste. Mauvais ton is unforgivable. Without her parents’ direct support, it’s up to her to maintain elegance and secure her future. She’s more than up to the task.

This book was hilarious! The twist made me laugh and laugh. The bulk of the novella is delicate prose describing Marguerite’s lifestyle, and the second half skewers exploitative practices in the publishing industry. Another reviewer, karencarlson, explains that The English Understand Wool’s themes are very typical for a DeWitt story: “uncompromising aesthetics/ethics, nontraditional education, and the treachery of (much of) the publishing world.” Under DeWitt’s pen, those themes are fine sugar glass treats to savor.

The English Understand Wool is just the most charming little novella. Perfect for an elegant afternoon. 

Karencarlson’s review: https://app.thestorygraph.com/reviews/365c8fae-455a-4e20-9800-eb52e0b8a91b