Chi's Sweet Adventures, Vol. 1 by Kanata Konami

DNF @ 32%

If I had paid money for this, I would have given it a one star, but because I read it on Kindle Unlimited, I feel I can afford to be a little generous. Besides, the drawings were cute. That's basically the only good thing I can say about this story. Come for the cute kitten and then leave for the bad formatting. Ugh.

The first book I read by this author was in the FukuFuku: Kitten Tales series, and I really, really loved it. FukuFuku has very simple panels and not a lot of text. Most of the actions speak for themselves: a kitten getting up to crazy antics, much to the despair of the little old lady who is her owner. The panels were easy to read and there wasn't a lot of dialogue so it was a nice break in between more dialogue-heavy comics.

By contrast, Chi's Sweet Adventures has a lot of dialogue and it's, well, annoying. I understand that this is a manga for kids, but the writing is terrible and there is too much going on in the panels, making them feel very busy.

This has also been formatted very poorly for e-readers. Unlike some manga, this one doesn't have an option to go panel by panel with the text enlarge. The print is small and two pages have been squished to fit each e-reader "page." Each panel has a "to be continued" written on it, like it's a choose your own adventure, and it took me several chapters to realize that the panels don't read right to left, top to bottom, but left column down and then back up and then right column down. I've never seen a manga formatted like this and it's not common-sense and very distracting, and repeatedly pulled me out of the story.

I was not a fan and won't be continuing this series.

1.5 out of 5 stars