I enjoyed the Experience of reading this, the build-up of tension and mystery got me really invested in watching the events unfold, but the ending felt a bit underwhelming in comparison.

Sisters in Yellow follows Hana, a highschool dropout who finds a family in the staff of Lemon the small bar she co-runs in Sancha (Setagaya Ward in Tokyo). Lemon is her whole life, acting as both a source of income and fulfillment that allows her to maintain a quaint life with Kimiko, the sketchy guardian she sort of adopted when she was 16, and Momoko and Ran, two friends she recruited as hostesses who are equally estranged from their biological families. Then Lemon burns down and the cash-strapped quartet resorts to less than legal means of profitting from Tokyo's busy streets.

The story's unconventional structure begins at the end, when Hana is an adult that's gone on the straight and narrow, setting up the mystery of their shady criminal past that would slowly be unveiled through a flashback that makes up the bulk of the book. Honestly, the anticipation of Kimiko's Evil Spiral was what kept me invested. The drama was also well-done and the procession of money-related misfortunes never-ending. While the story was told in first person POV, it all felt impersonal, like it was hard to gauge Hana's emotions even from inside her head, just like the distance she maintains with the people she loves, whom she feels almost obligated to Save from whatever problems befall them while keeping a strong front, to the point of irrationality sometimes. You're so immersed in her psyche that you're only really able to see how Insane she's being when she talks to other people.

While Hana is relentlessly put through the wringer, the explosion I was anticipating in the climax did not unfold in such a dramatic fashion. If anything, Hana seemed to have a more well-defined insanity arc compared to Kimiko? (Who, in fairness, has always been a bit insane) And the revelation at the end was weirdly underwhelming, like encountering a pothole where you expected a death drop.

(Lastly, not a major thing since Hana isn't explicitly queer, and contrary to expectations about a story set in Tokyo's nightlife sex is a pretty background thing, but Hana is seemingly uninterested in sex and even less interested in men, so she gives me homoromantic ace vibes? Her thoughts about Kotomi during the karaoke scene were Something, and then the hotel gig?? Hana I know what u are...)

Sisters in Yellow is about the working-class grind, the pains of growing up younger but not necessarily wiser, and leaving home in order to find it. A slow-burn slice of life crime novel for people who enjoy explorations of complex female relationships, turbulent mental states, and oddly soft landings

Thank you to Picador and Netgalley for the eARC. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

Low-key Giovanni's Room if they broke each other's hearts over years instead of weeks. Almost Life is a love story that unfolds over the course of four summers between Erica, professional Parisian tourist, and Laure, professional Parisian. They also happen to be an aspiring writer and art theorist, respectively; and broke, collectively. At least at first, when their relationship was at its least complicated.

Erica and Laure's character arcs seemed to move in opposite directions; when one of them starts healing the other one starts eroding. It's sort of fitting for a couple that we only get to see together in the summer, when their lives are in limbo and a decision is always waiting to be made. They experience most major life events (funerals, marriages, addiction recovery) apart rather than together. Their persistent connection feels both stubbornly inevitable and increasingly hopeless. They could make each other happy, but for how long? That's something neither they nor the reader will ever know. The switching POVs really showed the layers of miscommunication and differing perspectives at play while also giving the plot some motion even in the most introspective parts.

The character writing was just sublime. Erica in particular can be so compellingly atrocious. With Laure, you know that her mental health is on a knife's edge from the get-go (and it gets worse to the point that it can only get better), but Erica feels like a deconstruction of youth's deceptive possibilities and adulthood's self-made boundaries. She has made me feel both second-hand embarrasment and mortification and she sometimes feels like a psychological terrorist to both herself and the people around her. Like, she can pick the worst possible dialogue options and maintain the haziest relationship boundaries in Western Europe, but the outcome is somehow both better and worse than you'd think.

A turbulent relationship drama that explores themes of mental health, aging, and art. Best enjoyed if you're.looking for a stiuationship that will leave you hollowed out.

Thank you to Picador and Netgalley for the eARC. All thoughts and opinions are my own.