Trigger warning: Not shown, but told about child rape.
This took me weeks to get through. Unlike the other books, I did not fly through this. This ended up being so convoluted and just not enjoyable even after the reveals. I think that Uketsu focusing on several buildings/stories in this one, just took away the appeal that had me loving the first two books out there. It just felt like a lot of the reveals/endings to some of the buildings didn’t make a lot of sense either. Too many coincidences after a while and it just made it feel blah after a while.
Strange Buildings follows the author (still unknown) who is dealing with him becoming famous because of Strange Houses. We know get him involved with mysteries surrounding 11 separate places, mysterious deaths, etc. Most of the book is the author trying to work out what the person who is telling them the tale is being truthful about, or just not realizing the truth about a situation. He comes up with his own deductions, which are mostly wrong.
The book just drags. I found myself not even caring about the layout of the buildings anymore because I just wanted the book to hurry the heck up after a while.
The action of this book moves all over the place and we get introduced to so many people, they all started to run together after a while.
The ending though just felt kind of blah because the author visits his architecture friend from the last book who somehow solves everything in like 5 seconds. I honestly don’t think a reader could have gotten there which makes this very disappointing. I just kept reading to get to the solved part of the book. And then we get a final scene with the author and someone who he believes murdered someone else and it just fell flat. The book just kind of ends and you are left wondering what would even happen after this. We get some major trauma in this book and it feels like none of it gets resolved in a satisfactory way at all.
