A review by maketeaa
Heaven by Mieko Kawakami

dark emotional sad medium-paced

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

4.75

wow this book is painful. you know, at first i put off picking it up for a while because the blurb makes you think it'll be a cliché romance between two kids that are bullied and fight against the mean kids at school with the power of friendship. but it is so much more than that. this is gruesome and dark and just so unbelievably sad. mieko kawakami is not writing a story where bullying is just a narrative tool, but a story where it is examined, analysed, along with our own freedom of choice, of how we give meaning to our lives, of what it means to be strong and to be weak. what kept striking me as i read was how young all the characters were, and the tendency for adults to brush off the problems of these young people when, really, the complicated mixture of the lack of personal agency but also the serious accountability they can rely on others their age being held to just makes all these very real, very horrifying situations all the more inescapable.

i loved the theme of the narrator's lazy eye, and the shock that it was so easy to correct at the end. i loved how we never learn the narrator's name, how it was a perfect and heartbreaking example of momose's statement that they didn't bully him because of anything specific, that there was no reason, that he could just be any other boy.

such an amazing book.