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Familiar Diversions

I'm a librarian who loves anime, manga, and reading a wide variety of genres.

Currently reading

How a Realist Hero Rebuilt the Kingdom, Vol. 1
Dojyomaru, Fuyuyuki, Sean McCann
Progress: 103/374 pages
Darkly Dreaming Dexter
Jeff Lindsay
Progress: 424/470 minutes
Wait Till Helen Comes: A Ghost Story
Mary Downing Hahn
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Parental Guidance
Avery Flynn
Progress: 40 %
An Offer From a Gentleman
Julia Quinn
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The Twisted Ones
T. Kingfisher
Progress: 385/385 pages
Educated
Tara Westover
Progress: 315/730 minutes
My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom!, Vol. 2
Satoru Yamaguchi, Nami Hidaka
Progress: 24/171 pages
Graphic Medicine Manifesto
MK Czerwiec, Kimberly R. Myers, Scott T. Smith, Michael J. Green, Susan Merrill Squier, Ian Williams
Progress: 26/172 pages
Ao Oni: Mutation
Kenji Kuroda, Karin Suzuragi, Alexander Keller-Nelson
Progress: 30/152 pages
SPOILER ALERT!

A Silent Voice (manga, vol. 6) by Yoshitoki Oima, translated by Steven LeCroy

A Silent Voice 6 - Yoshitoki Oima

Shoya saves Shoko but ends up in the hospital, badly injured and unconscious. This whole volume is about the aftermath of Shoko's suicide attempt: Shoko helping Tomohiro finish his movie in an effort to fix what she feels she broke; Yuzuru upset because the pictures she'd kept taking hadn't stopped Shoko from wanting to die; Naoka remembering how she stood by as Shoya was bullied; and Satoshi realizing his desire to become a teacher was all about his own creepy wish to monitor the kids of his own former bullies.

This series is so dark, and this particular volume is pretty violent. Naoka beats up Shoko because she blames her for Shoya being in the hospital, and Shoko's mom attacks (like actually physically attacks) Naoka for beating up Shoko. I wasn't surprised that people like Naoka and Shoya's mother blamed Shoko for what happened to Shoya, but I hated that they did, because she was hurting too. If Shoko's emotional wounds had been able to manifest as physical wounds, she'd probably have been hospitalized too.

I hadn't realized Yuzuru's morbid photography was more than just a phase. Apparently

Shoko had tried to kill herself before, and Yuzuru's photography was her way of trying to make Shoko want to live, without actually saying so. Which...didn't really work out so well. She comes to the conclusion that she should have talked to Shoko about Shoko's past suicide attempt, and...I don't know. Remember that Yuzuru is actually Shoko's younger sister. I agree that she should maybe have been a bit less vague about telling Shoko that she wanted her to continue living, but at the same time Yuzuru has carried so much on her shoulders for years. I hate the idea of her taking on even more.

(show spoiler)


The bit with Satoshi really, really creeped me out. There was a hint of some of this in, I think, volume 5, in the way Satoshi handled things when he witnessed a younger kid being bullied. He put a stop to it, yes, but the way he did it made me wonder just how scary he'd be once he was in charge of a classroom. This peek into his motives for becoming a teacher wasn't pretty, although thankfully he'd gotten to the point where he'd realized that too. Still, it seems kind of unfair that characters like Shoya, Shoko, and others had to have the most damaged and ugliest sides of themselves put on display for other characters to see, while Satoshi just gets to quietly reconsider his future with no one the wiser.

This volume finally gave readers a few pages from Shoko's POV, sort of. It was basically like getting to see the world the way she sees it, but with none of her thoughts to go with it. Which got me googling whether deaf people think in terms of an “inner voice,” which in turn made me think that Oima really could have done this part better. At some point, I need to see if I can find any reviews of this series written by deaf people.

 

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)