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mdpenguin 's review for:
A Small Charred Face
by Kazuki Sakuraba
Another 3.5 star book that I'm rounding up. If you pick this up and really like the first two stories, skip the last one: it's out of place. The first two are kind of dreamy and have a strange draw to them. It's not like the story really pushes them along so much as I felt drawn along by some odd charm. The first story was very moving. There was a lot that I liked about the second, such as Mariko's innocent naivete mixed with her monstrous nature. The third story, the origin of the Bamboo in Japan, just wasn't that interesting. The pseudo-realistic, excited, and occasionally vacuous dialog that worked reasonably well in the first two stories made the entire species look silly in the third. I mean, oh, well, um...the royal family wasn't that impressive and the story of the fifth child and how she sent the sixth to Japan wasn't that interesting. If I ranked the stories individually on a 7 point scale with 7 being the best and 1 being don't bother, the first would be just over 6 stars, the second 5, and the third would be 3. Because the first story is the bulk of the book, I'm letting it pull the total up to the 3.5/5 instead of the 2.5/5 that they would all average out if they were weighted equally.