Pandorahearts Caucus Race, Vol. 3

by Shinobu Wakamiya

[sa090]

The last entry in the Caucus Race Light Novels, if anything, I can now officially say goodbye to the last consumable piece of Pandora Hearts.

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Out of three novels so far, this one is the one I liked the most. It’s probably because we started the story about some of the most interesting characters in the series, since it was just one story from the 4 presented in the book. I feel a little annoyed at that given that I really believe they deserve more page time in a novel like this one. Then we had to go back to the other characters and it became somewhat boring again, despite the stories all having a slice of life mood, the fact that we see a different side to the time before the tragedy of Sablier, made the instance intriguing for me. When we went back, it had the same mood as the previous novels which isn’t something I like reading all that much.

Now if I take the stories themselves, none of them in the entire series of these novels are actually thaaaaaaat boring. It’s just my state of mind is wired towards expecting mind blowing things over and over again with this series, which these novels never provided to me. I really wish I was looking for more mellow things to read before starting them, it might’ve been more fun, but again I guess I expected way too much out of Wakamiya-sensei. The writing in itself is something I enjoy, because she stays very close to how the characters behaved in the manga series and the anime. Maybe, it doesn’t work as well in a written format compared to the drawings in the anime, but I can easily visualize manga Alice for example, doing everything that she’s doing in this novel.

Seeing Break and the others again is always amusing when taking in these situations, and I’m not going to deny that I was intrigued by the instances where people you don’t really think would show up, actually did. That being said, my favourite story out of ALL remains the first in this one. I enjoy seeing the time 100 years ago, I wish that it would have expanded to include snippets of other characters in other periods of time to keep it more linked or in other places if you catch my drift, but I guess I’ll make due with this lonely entertaining one.

A bonus here would be where one of the stories actually builds up the world a bit. In the manga and in turn the previous novels, we see the world through the Dukedoms eyes, lower ranked entities in society don’t get that massive focus if you exclude the few instances from the manga. In this novel, we get to see a little more about them, how they are in their lives, where they live and hear some interesting gossip. It’s not that extensive for sure, given the direction of that particular story, but overall it’s still something new to gain from this series of novel so I’ll take it as a bonus regardless.

In the end, I didn’t really enjoy this series. Some instances were okay, that is a form of solace, but other than that I do consider the time I spent on this somewhat wasted on things I didn’t enjoy. The fact that it’s from Pandora Hearts made me push on and read it, but I think I’ll just stick to reading the manga again and being blown away by it. Suits me better :)

Final rating: 2.5/5