I have to admit, I gave up on this one. I love the title, but the premise (a sort of Phantom of the Opera mystery) is ridiculous and the writing is awful. As it was written in Japanese originally, I'm inclined to blame the translator, but usually Yen Press does better than this.

I kind of started reading this yesterday on my break at work, got home, and stayed up too late in order to finish it. This whole series is like that - I start a bit leisurely, then find myself compelled to finish the book as soon as possible, because I have to get to the end. Even with the over-acted, melodramatic, confusing climaxes that blur the lines between fantasy and reality-based acts. I never know for sure if a particular incident or character is "real" or if it can truly be something supernatural, since the title character of the series is a book-goblin.

Anyway, the fourth book is much like the other three. The volume's plot in this case is based on The Phantom of the Opera. Konoha Inoue and Tohko Amano are made aware of something unusual in the lives of schoolmates and curiosity and concern for their friends drives them to investigate. In this case, though, Konoha is mostly doing it on his own, since Tohko is busy studying for university entrance exams, and he doesn't want to distract her. It turns out that one of Konoha's classmates, Nanase Kotobuki, is worried because her best friend (at another school) has gone missing, and Nanase has always been wary of the friend's descriptions of her "Angel of Music" and her boyfriend.

This first-person narrative by Konoha is interspersed by a second first-person narrative by someone intimately involved with the mystery - whether it is the missing friend herself, the Angel, or someone else, takes a bit to become clear (and even then, there are sometimes red herrings and twists). The second narrative drops clues about the nature of the mystery, but they're often opaque or misleading until the climax solves it all. And, of course, Konoha has no idea about it. It makes for a very compelling read, to get to the point when the two merge and all becomes clear, though that climax is in this case a bit melodramatic and confusing to me. There was so much going on, and so much blurring of reality, that it felt like it was overdone and it took me a bit to figure it all out.

The weirdness to the climax is partly because Konoha is the narrator, and Konoha has some serious problems with depression. This is what I think of as the primary plot, which is the basis for the entire series. Although it's called "Book Girl", Konoha Inoue is truly the driving force. Before the series begins, he has written a novel at age 14 which won a new author prize and became extremely popular - there were many adaptations. But he wrote it under the name Miu Inoue, after the girl he was madly in love with (Miu, of course). The only thing is that she jumped off a roof in front of him, and he couldn't stand the link with her name and the publicity (even if everyone though he was actually a girl and not himself), so he had a bit of a mental break and became a recluse during his last year of middle school. The series is about him coming to terms with what happened to Miu; to come to terms with his writing and the novel; to gain confidence in himself and learn to open up to friends. As each book progresses, the reader learns more and more about the facts of his past, and it becomes increasingly clear that as part of his breakdown, he deliberately blocked out certain things related to Miu.

I am super impatient to get to book 5 in a few months, because we'll finally have more details about Miu herself and find out what really happened. Because I think this is a great series (please ignore the manga-style illustrations if that's not your thing!), I don't want to spoil, but Corrupted Angel dropped a HUGE bomb of revelation about Miu and her and Konoha's relationship, and I just know it's going to be all kinds of drama and amazing in the next book. ( )