Review: Yo-Kai Watch 9 (by Noriyuki Konishi)

My Rating: 4 stars

My nephew is a huge Yo-kai Watch fan.  He started liking the franchise after playing the game on his Nintendo 3DS and from there, he started watching the anime series and of course collecting all manner of Yo-kai memorabilia, including the different generations of the watch itself as well as the medals, plushies, figurines, posters, toys, etc.  He even has special Nano blocks sets of his favorite Yo-kai characters, Jibanyan and Komasan (both of which took me hours to build, lol)!  As my nephew's gaming buddy, I was automatically given the "privilege" of sharing in his Yo-kai Watch obsession, and of course, being the bookworm in the family as well as already holding the honored position of "Designated Reading Buddy" with my nephew, I naturally seized the opportunity to cultivate the bookish side of his obsession.  To supplement his many toys and video games, I'm constantly on the lookout for Yo-kai Watch related books for him to read, though unfortunately, there aren't too many options out there in English.  A few years ago, I stumbled upon a Yo-kai Watch manga series by Noriyuki Konishi (which was translated and released in the U.S. starting in 2015) and when I showed it to my nephew, he instantly fell in love with the series – it is currently one of his all-time favorites and he re-reads various books from the series practically every month.  When I was browsing on Edelweiss a few days ago, I saw that the latest offering, Book 9 in the series, was available already so I jumped on requesting an advance copy and much to my delight, was approved fairly quickly.  My nephew of course wanted to read the book right away when I told him about it so that's exactly what we did last night for our nightly story session.  Both of us had a lot of fun reading this one and overall we loved it, though we did feel that some of the segments were a bit "wordier" than the ones from previous books so it did break the flow a little bit.  Also, my nephew wasn't as familiar with some of the newer Yo-kai characters, so we got a little sidetracked looking up some of those characters.  Aside from that though, this was all-in-all a delightful read and needless to say, my nephew can't wait to add the physical copy of the book to his collection once it releases in July!

Received ARC from Viz Media and Simon & Schuster via Edelweiss