Book Girl and the Scribe Who Faced God

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It was cold and empty. Tohko wasn’t there.
Tohko-whose braids had come unraveled and blown around wildly, who had gripped my arm, whose eyes had been filled with anguish, who had screamed at me and trembled.
When I recalled her pale face or her voice as she asked me, “Why?!” a scarring pain ran through my chest and my breath choked off.
“Why…?”
As soon as I’d spoken the word, my throat closed up, my nostrils flared, and my eyelids burned.
“…Why, Tohko…?”

Tohko Amano is drawing away from Konoha Inoue because of her exams and she doesn’t have to come to school. But there is more than that. Tohko wants Konoha to write a novel, but that’s the last thing Konoha would like to do. He has decided to never write a novel! But slowly, slowly Konoha learns that there is more to Tohko than he has known. There’s a Tohko who he doesn’t know and he gets involved in the complicated life of the Amano-Sakurai family.

At the same time Konoha is trying his hardest to be a good boyfriend to his girlfriend Nanase Kotobuki, but it’s hard when he is torn between the despair Tohko gives him in her absence and the love he has for Nanase.

This is a post of both parts of The Scribe Who Faced God, which means this is a post about the last two parts of the Book Girl series.

The first part is more about Konoha’s love-life and Ryuto Sakurai interfering with it, while the second is more about Tohko’s family. The both together builds up to a struggle of Konoha loving both Nanase and Tohko and how he doesn’t know what to do when Tohko is leaving – disappearing from his life. But it’s in the end about love. Not just Konoha’s love-life, but love for your friends, for your family and then, of course, different shapes of romantic love.

The first book was okay by itself, and the second was… well… better. The first was building up very slowly until a plot twist at the very end of the novel and then the second part took up the speed a bit, still building up to a turning point. Both together was a great read, but the first part was just so ridiculously slow that it made me feel sorry for myself for having to read it.

Although there are slow parts of this two-book ending of the series, the ending was good and well thought out. Book five was about Konoha and Miu, and so this was about Tohko. After reading the last two books, some things in the previous ones change completely and I feel that this series definitely has to be read more than once. And it’s a very good series. I think however, it might be hard to digest because it deals with a lot of death. I happen to like when people die in literature and I like seeing characters bare those “ugly” feelings, but I also don’t see them as ugly just human.

A great end to a great series, and although it has both its ups and downs it manages to tie the ends well. It was a good breakup with a series I enjoyed reading, and I know that when I read the books again, or when I read the sequels and side stories, I am likely to cry. But for a while I won’t read any of it and hopefully I won’t read the first words of the first book with tears in my eyes whenever I choose to open the cover again.

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