A review by zhelana
Go by Kazuki Kaneshiro

challenging dark medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.0

This is a book about racial discrimination in Japan, narrated by a Korean boy who was born in Japan but could never get Japanese citizenship because he wasn't ethnically Japanese. He falls in love with a Japanese girl but she leaves him when he tells her he is Korean. But then, without really exploring what happened to change things, they get back together and everything is alright again. The book spent too long ramping up and not enough time on the actual character change or end of the story. So it felt simultaneously like it was too long and too short. It's only 174 pages long, so there clearly was more space that could have been used to examine the girl character coming to grips with her racism or something. Anyway, I don't know whether I liked this or not, I didn't actively dislike it, and I continued reading it all the way through, but I didn't feel like I had much of a sense of the female character at all, and the male character was something of a bully, even though he portrays it as a response to bullying he is suffering from. But anyway I wasn't quite sure what to make of this book in the end.