Yzabel

[I received a copy through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.]

This was a pleasant read overall, but I admit I found the writing style hard to get into, and that downplayed my enjoyment of it.

Perhaps it was the translation, in parts, but not only. For instance, I had trouble with more than one paragraph dealing with one idea, and then suddenly switching to an action that had been started in the previous paragraph—I felt like saying “either finish this action first, or put it in the next paragraph.” I don’t know if it’s just me, if I have a strange sense of how things go together? It was just jarring to me. The time travel rule quickly became redundant, too.

In general, I also felt that this would fare better as a movie. The four vignettes' endings were all in all easy to foresee, the characters are fairly cookie-cutter and sometimes have exaggerated gestures, and when some of them have downplayed reactions (such as Nagare not really expressing his feelings), we don’t get privy to their internal life much either, so the writing medium didn’t really bring much in that regard either.

This said, as mentioned above, I still liked the story. It had a certain atmosphere, a ‘locked room’ feeling since the action only happened in the café, but not in an oppressive way—more like an intimate, slice-of-life moment, that had its own charm.