This is more of a 3.5 than a 3 star. I just struggle with this series. This volume was interesting because it goes into Richard's backstory with Saul and that part was the best part of the story. It's quite angsty and good. We also finally got the story with Chieko and Richard's mother, and it was neat to see how that was written originally.

I also really enjoyed the dives into Seigi's character in regard to how he views himself, his relationship with Hiromi, and his relationship with people generally. There's a story that is in the anime that I hope isn't anime-original, and might be coming up next volume, given the stories we see in this one, and I think a lot of things are going to fall into place there, so I'm looking forward to it.

That being said, there were maybe 5 overall stories in this volume, and 3 were felt pointless and boring. I also want to say, while I loved the story with Chieko, the oddly positive reference to Margaret Thatcher of all people was bizarre. Does Tsujimura not know just how terrible Thatcher was or was this some weird failing in the translation? The opening story was entirely uninteresting and badly paced, and the last two stories were by and large completely uninteresting. So it starts and ends with incredibly uninteresting tedium and incredibly weird commentary about Christianity.

Continuous issues were the spelling mistakes and odd formatting. It was frequently hard to tell who was talking, and it sometimes seemed like characters were talking to themselves in verbal conversation. Scene shifts were also sometimes difficult to parse. I like to hope this is down to the translation, not Tsujimura's writing, but it made the reading difficult at times.

All in all, like most of the series, it's a mixed bag. High highs and low lows. I still encourage people to just skip the novels and watch the anime, maybe give the manga a shot. They both are better than this in a lot of ways, even with Seigi and Richard's relationship being a lot more wonderfully blatant in the novels. ( )