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My rating for this is deeply personal; many people hate this book for the same reasons I love it. Some people love it for reasons I don't.

First, to me, this is obviously a dramatization of the 1979 Revolution in Iran and its aftermath, transposed to the US. Tehran went from a very liberal, highly Westernized city to a combination of Sharia law and "revolutionary justice" under martial law within a few short years. So while there is a sense of "it could happen here" that's spooked people for decades -- this IS the Dominionist goal in a nutshell -- the exact story isn't a total fit for the US, especially given the changes in the decades since publication. Dominionism reached the height of its power around the turn of the millennium, and has faded since, to be replaced by other forms of extremism.

That said, the premise isn't unbelievable enough to detract from the story.

And what a story it is. Meandering, jumping across time in memories and vignettes, sometimes explicitly admitting an untruth and sometimes leaving truth open to interpretation, as if it was really being told out loud. Incredibly, intensely, breathtakingly poetic at times; there are florid passages about the garden that make my heart break. Full of musing and deliberation, sometimes regret and sometimes an iron refusal to regret. Characters that offset the narrator in many different ways, so that her meekness doesn't become a one-note portrait of femininity throughout.

Those same charges have been leveled against it by detractors. We all enjoy what we enjoy, and roll our eyes at what others enjoy. You'll know if you enjoy those things.

Not that everything was perfect, of course. The drips of memory are deliberately coy right to the end, ensuring that each piece of the past is a cliffhanger to tide you over to the next. The epilogue is clumsy and ill-fitting, an experiment like the main story that doesn't hold up as well.

In the end, I connected with most of then characters in this book, and with the overall theme. I'm not afraid of it, but it's been at the back of my mind for years. That duality is where the book lives and thrives.

I'm giving this a 3/5, but at the same time looking forward to the next volume. If a non-fetishistic depiction of lgbt and crossdressing is very rare in Japanese media, a depiction of a non-binary person is virtually non-existent. Non-conformist of any sort seem to always need to fall into some other bucket to be legitimized instead of comic relief, and while the author has carved out a basic idea for everyone, they've left space for evolution. [b:Wandering Son, Vol. 1|7829373|Wandering Son, Vol. 1|Takako Shimura|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327284489l/7829373.SX50.jpg|6454458] is one of the few cd/trans stories I know that gave characters space to breathe and discover themselves, even if it was sometimes the hard way. Of course, that series was written more deftly from the beginning, and avoided the sillier shoujo manga clichés.

The first half was clunky in the way that only a Saturday morning Very Special Episode can be, but as characters started settling into themselves it started getting better. There's still time for it to be more than a collection of stereotypical characters and romance drama. Crossing my fingers here.

As for the art, while the character designs and paneling are, unfortunately, rather generic, there's an interesting balance between very bog-standard art and very delicately drawn close-ups. Konyam sees the eyes as a window to the soul and seems to put the most effort into getting them perfectly shaded.

"You ask me what it feels like to have wings. I can only tell you the feeling with words. And words have neither feelings nor wings."

This is Mortality Bridge. It is visceral beyond anything I've ever seen before, far beyond any Divine Comedy or Silent Hill or Walking Dead. At least 50% of the entire novel is a ceaseless trudge through filth, a bunch of mud piss shit blood bones exposed nerves running on fumes terror resignation.

Get used to lines like that. Commas aren't used much in Mortality Bridge. Why? It's your fate get through the words anyway.

You'll probably either love it or hate it. There were times when it was just too much for me. But what I got out of this book was some of the most vivid writing I've read in ages, modern mythmaking calling back to ancient myth, a vast and mesmerizing collection of all manner of body horror, the highs and lows of slow suicide by chemical intoxication, and an ending that actually does the story justice, in its own absurd way.

And the taxicab driver was the best co-star, despite the short screentime. It didn't surprise me when I learned that the entire book came out of a fresh idea for them. They alone are worth the price of admission.

Tough book to rate, here. When it drags, it really drags, but when it moves, it zips. Sometimes the frame story premise of being a written memoir is almost obnoxiously intrusive, other times it melds with the story so fluidly that you can't image it told any other way.

I liked it, though. It's all about a privileged, rich, sheltered white girl in the world's biggest city on the cusp of war, and the rebuilding after, but it doesn't revel in either the privilege, the judgment, or the inevitable comeuppance: It's acknowledged, it's accepted for what it was, and it moves on. It acknowledges a lot of other lives, and it moves on. That kind of slice of life gave it extra power for me.

Whether you love it, you hate it, or you tolerate is depends entirely on how listening to a stranger tell you their life story for six hours sounds to you.

Go into this expecting a steamy yuri manga and you will be disappointed. This is josei, all the way, despite the budding tension between Shimizu and Maekawa.

Still Sick is really about two career women being ground down by the corporate machine finding friendship over a few months of sharing time and interests together. One an overly poetic nerd unconvincingly convinced that her only interest in yuri is in her art, one a happy-go-lucky frustrated burnout hiding her artistic side. Both, ultimately, lonely, and going to great lengths to pretend they aren't, but fall right into a relatively easy friendship quickly. Sure, there's some drama, but it's not the manufactured drama of a romance, especially the usual triangle; it's the dumb things friends do to piss each other off, and the dumb things we do to sabotage our own relationships, before calling a truce to get back to normal.

I think this speaks a lot more to how incredibly overwhelming and powerful it can be to find someone who shares your hobby and just wants to be your friend as an adult. And how hard it can be to be friends with anyone when you're not a friend kind of person -- and don't like yourself.