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defygravity_88 's review for:
Lonely Castle in the Mirror
by Mizuki Tsujimura
adventurous
dark
mysterious
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
If you find yourself struggling with this book at first, I encourage you to push through it. My main issue was with the pacing and structure; the first part felt slow, and it takes about 200 pages for the story to truly pick up. While the book addresses important themes and challenges that adolescents face while growing up, I wish the structure had been different. I would have preferred more showing rather than telling, and I believe the story would have benefited from alternating points of view. With a singular viewpoint, I found myself only rooting for one player on the baseball team, which made the experience less engaging; it’s not very enjoyable to watch a game with only one player participating while the others, including the opposing team, don't appear until the end.
That being said, the book conveys an important message and gains momentum towards the end. However, there is a significant information dump that overwhelmed me, forcing me to go back several times to reread passages to ensure I understood everything correctly. I appreciated the originality of the story and some of its twists. While I predicted some of the bigger revelations, others genuinely surprised me. Ultimately, the issues with the structure, the lack of multiple perspectives, the overwhelming miscommunication trope, and the information dump at the end are why I rated it three stars.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Bullying, Cancer, Child abuse, Child death, Death, Domestic abuse, Emotional abuse, Grief
If you find yourself struggling with this book at first, I encourage you to push through it. My main issue was with the pacing and structure; the first part felt slow, and it takes about 200 pages for the story to truly pick up. While the book addresses important themes and challenges that adolescents face while growing up, I wish the structure had been different. I would have preferred more showing rather than telling, and I believe the story would have benefited from alternating points of view. With a singular viewpoint, I found myself only rooting for one player on the baseball team, which made the experience less engaging; it’s not very enjoyable to watch a game with only one player participating while the others, including the opposing team, don't appear until the end.
That being said, the book conveys an important message and gains momentum towards the end. However, there is a significant information dump that overwhelmed me, forcing me to go back several times to reread passages to ensure I understood everything correctly. I appreciated the originality of the story and some of its twists. While I predicted some of the bigger revelations, others genuinely surprised me. Ultimately, the issues with the structure, the lack of multiple perspectives, the overwhelming miscommunication trope, and the information dump at the end are why I rated it three stars.