Totally see why the 2nd volume is rated so low compared to the 1st. I had to push myself so hard to finish this book. Glad that it ended the way I wanted, but it was still one heck of a frustrating and annoying book.
No doubt Higuchi is a skillful writer, but also no doubt she sucks balls at writing romance. In fact the only reason why I read this book till the very end was because the overall plot and the mystery were intriguing. The romance, or to be precise, the dialogues between the MC and his love interest, on the other hand were crap. Their romance was supposed to be bittersweet and heart-wrenching, yet every single interaction between them was so horrible I found myself skimming through the characters' lines just so I didn't have to cringe over how incompatible these two were. No chemistry whatsoever, NONE!
The top was Higuchi's usual douche again. Condescending, authoritarian, inconsistent, the epitome of the type of person that I hate the most. I had to wait until the very end of the book to make sense of his actions, which yea made sense but still didn't change the fact that I had such an unpleasant time with this dude.
The MC, gosh was it just me or he really was substantially infantilized in this volume compared to the previous. He became such a single-minded and clingy character, who, once realized his feelings for the top, then proceeded to completely abandon his original goal of gaining control of his life and improve the country's current social conditions. Man and the way he talked, I just couldn't stomach those questions that ended with a の. Made him sound like a burikko and made him appear not as an equal but as an inferior to the top. Ye sure you can argue that he was indeed a 16-year-old child who lost his memories and lacked experiences and all, but I can't help it I hate burikko, biggest pet peeve ever 🙃
Appropriate ending though, and I did enjoy the mystery, but overall it was still a frustrating book for me. 2.5/5. Higuchi Misao is still not to my taste as ever.