PandoraHearts ~Caucus Race~, Vol. 1 (light novel)

by Jun Mochizuki

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You know when you love something so much and you expect everything related to it to be just as wonderful? But then you get something related to it and it’s just so awful in comparison? That right there is the first volume of Caucus Race.

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Pandora Hearts is a very special series for me, regardless of how many manga series I pick up, none of them managed to make me go through what Pandora Hearts did. So whenever there is something extra for the series, I strive my best to read it, get familiar with it and the like. This time was no different, I had the volumes for a while so I thought I’ll read it as a change of pace, and unfortunately I expected to be blown away every single time. Thing is, this novel is basically just small slice of life snippets from the four dukedoms. But out of the 4 of them, only one was entertaining and that was only because it followed a more mystery format to it than the others. The others might’ve been fun to read about as well, if they weren’t as freakin boring as they were.

I’m sure it’s because my expectations were through the roof, but I still can’t help think that it was because how the stories themselves weren’t as entertaining as a I hoped. Maybe, it’s because I’ve seen similar cases of everything discussed in multiple places that I was disappointed? That’s probably it because the writing was pretty easy to go through, and the author tried their best to stay true to the characters. I say it like this because Wakamiya Shinobu is not the mastermind behind Pandora Hearts, that achievement belongs to Mochizuki Jun who is currently writing another series that is just brilliant. Ahh, now that I wrote it like this, i think one of the reasons of why I couldn’t enjoy this is because I’m comparing between the creators way too much.

I do think however that this type of novels fits a certain crowd that I’m most likely not amongst, I prefer the darkness of Pandora Hearts over anything else. Caucus Race was more on the upbeat side and like I said, taking a slice of life format is more than fine if you can make it entertaining, but I guess this time I just wasn’t the intended target for them. I did enjoy the 4th story though, definitely the best of the 4.

I won’t lie, I’m severely disappointed with this first novel and I’m only continuing with them because my love for Pandora Hearts is too great for me to stop over something like this. But I do hope that the others aren’t as cutesy as these, especially since we’ll be looking into other families and more exciting entities.

Final rating: 1.5/5