(affiliate link)
Miwako Sumida is like the anti-Manic Pixie Dream Girl. She’s serious, studious, blunt, and unwilling to take her relationship with Ryuesi any further than weekly trips to their favourite secondhand bookstore. She’s also dead.
In The Perfect World Of Miwako Sumida, the man who loved her, his sister, and her best friend try to work out why Miwako Sumida felt she had to die. The wonderful team at Scribe sent me this entirely unexpected novel for review.
The Perfect World Of Miwako Sumida falls in the murky middle of the Venn diagram between literary fiction and conventional mystery.
The story is told in three parts, with fluid transitions between past and present to tell Miwako’s story. Normally I resist jumpy timelines, but this one unfolded so naturally I barely noticed.
In the final section, it also devolves into a more magical and mystical understanding of life and death – again, not usually my “thing”, but I was so wrapped up in this story and its characters that I barely raised an eyebrow.
This is a deep cut examination of what happens to a life left behind.
Leave a Reply