Book Girl (Book Girl Series #2) Book

For future reference to myself, I must remember to do more research into books before I read them. This is an especially good idea if the book is one that references, and is partly based on, other famous books. Since Book Girl tends to be a series of mysteries wherein the protagonists use their knowledge of other books to solve said mysteries that eerily resemble other famous tales, this is especially a good idea.

In Book Girl and the Famished Spirit, the plot reference of the novel is, which I would have known had a read the afterword first, Wuthering Heights. I hated that novel, and couldn't get more than a quarter of the way through it, so obviously I wouldn't like this one either. Yep, definitely should have looked ahead.

The story is one where this mysterious girl dresses up in an older school uniform and leaves random bits of paper in the book club's advice box. The book club, composed of our protagonists Konoha and Tohko, the titular "Book Girl" (a goblin who eats stories), decide to investigate. Of course, in the course of this, they have some discord and everything is a mess. I won't spoil who the Heathcliff and Catherine analogues are.

The thing is that this was easy not to see at first how this volume of Book Girl, unlike the first one, would be dark with no light at the end of the tunnel. It had no "victory" if you will, like in the first book. Indeed, the story started out with the weird bit of magical realism that the first book contained, and thus it didn't occur to me just how this was going to turn out until, about halfway through, I started to suspect. I confirmed it and wow! I hate this book. It is, if possible, even darker and more disturbing than Heights was, with possibly more messed-up secondary characters analogous to the Heights ones.

I can't say that the story wasn't enjoyable (as far as I got through it, at least...), but it was just too dark. Really, really dark. I can't recommend it, despite the good writing, as it was entirely too depressing.