Give me back my comfort zone

English Edition.

Out by Natsuo Kirino… or Hello Darkness!

This book is tremendous, just brilliant, but it is a bumpy and painful ride. You will laugh with a bit of acid in the mouth, but mostly is filled with despair: the traps of gender in a male dominated society, immigrants, poverty, violence, stigmas and the numb state of mind of barely living with so many burdens. Just add a terrible incident and bad choices (remember being numb and in despair?) and you have a recipe for disaster.

One strong point of this book is that there are no heroes and villains in the traditional sense, there is no easy fix for characterization, they are deeply flawed and even in the most monstrous state there is humanity inside (again, not about the “good” or “bad” humanity) and a window for understanding.

Violently dark and disturbing, it takes you far away of your comfort zone. Through the mindsets of the different characters and their specific circumstances, you get these different layers of understanding that give a special quality to the book, and it makes not only one lecture of what is happening, but many. The ending for instance, you could read it in the most literal way or you could chew the meat a bit more and it is unsettling and heartbreaking at the least… the places where the mind can take you.

I will devour everything I can get from Kirino, that's for sure.