I know this has probably been said about this book a ton of times, but there's some serious Ghibli vibes within these pages. It's a fun and cozy adventure with some decent stakes, some romance, some real cool world building - which is the real winner here - and overall decent characters. 

This one starts out in a very strange location. There's a door, but this door only opens to this location for the people who truly need it, otherwise it opens up into a sushi restaurant. Those who get to the other place, though, they get to experience something wholly magical and liminal. They walk into a pawn shop that trades in regrets. First off, I love stuff like that! What a strange and wonderful setting to start this book. And this also leads to one of my qualms with the book. We leave this location fairly quickly. I really wish we got to linger within the walls of the pawn shop for another chapter or two. But I get it, it's an adventure book and we gotta get moving!

So our main character, Hana, is inherting this shop from her dad. He's retiring and it's her turn to take up the family tradition. We don't know why yet, intrigue! Only her dad had some pretty radical plans to start off his retirinment. Hana wakes up on her first day of the owner of her store and finds it completely ransacked. She quickly pieces together that it was her dad, the main problem, though, is that he's missing. So he trashed the place and took off. Kind of a dick move really. 

While Hana is piecing all of this together she opens the door to the store which leads to the outside where the ramen shop is. A handsome guy happens to be around and see's into the pawn shop. He offers to help clean up the place. Hana initially declines, but then she lets him help. Let the romance build up begin. 

From here, our two main characters - Hana and Keishin (this mysterious handsome dude) - must delve deeper into Hana's world to solve this mystery. 

Alright, story sypnosis over. I won't get into spoilers here. It's a quick and relatively short book that you should just check out if you want some cozy vibes. 

As I mentioned early, the real hero of this novel is the world building. We have two worlds here: the world we currently live in (boring and ugh), and the world Hana lives in (magical, weird, and scary). We follow our two heroes as they go ever deeper into Hana's world in order find her dad and solve a few more family mysteries (where's her mom?). The world is so bright and vibrant, but also dark and scary. It's ruled by these very strange rules and laws which has everyone doing specific jobs forever. Then there's these horrific reaper like things that come and collect the magic that comes out of what the people do for work. It's whack and crazy. But also very cool!

The characters are fine. There's nothing too fantastic about the characters. Some of them have some pretty interesting jobs, which I won't spoiler here, but their personalities are a little lacking. But honestly, that's okay. This adventure is about the world and having blander characters really just makes the world that much more interesting because we can really put ourselves in the shoes of the characters on their adventure. 

The story itself goes into some pretty interesting places and is definitely worth the ride. I read through this book pretty quickly because it was so fun and cozy and also because it was a pretty easy read that kept me turning the digital pages of my Kobo. The cover art of the book really reveals the vibes you'll be feeling in this book. I'll definitely be picking up other books by this author!