Okay, I’ve got it listed in the nomination table! Thanks for your patience! Man, I wish I had enough space there to list genres or something; we’re slowly getting a nice variety of choices.
I have no idea. I discovered that the anime was adapted from a book series from a post that called them light novels, so I’ve been operating under the assumption that that’s what they are. Probably doesn’t help that I don’t really understand what the difference between light novels and regular novels is…
The characters are teenagers (in middle school in the beginning, though for most of the story in high school) and it feels pretty similar to a YA in English, so that doesn’t seem to go against what LNs generally are?
Nah, I would say that’s sounds like a safe bet for an LN. I guess just in general the dividing line can be pretty blurry. There was some discussion on it some time back here, but no satisfactory conclusion iirc.
Plus it’s a multi-book series (as opposed to standalone or a 上/中/下 split), which I think tends to often feel LN-ish. On the other hand, the publisher didn’t publish this under a specifically “light novel” imprint, so if you follow a hard-line “defined by the publisher” definition it wouldn’t fit (demonstrating why strict rule based genre definitions don’t work). Shueisha do have light novel imprints, and a lot of the author’s other work is under the definitely-LN 電撃文庫 (different publisher, that’s Kadokawa), but presumably Shueisha’s marketing department thought the books merited a release under their main imprint (or there was a particular editor that really liked the author and that’s where they happened to be, maybe).
Idle musings about publisher choices aside, it definitely sounds like an LN to me.
Yes, I was also looking at info available through the publisher and they are pushing hard the line of “this is not a light novel”, calling it a スポーツ小説 instead.
Literally everyone else on the internet seems to be calling it a light novel, though, so, whatever.
I remember buying a book from an author marketed as chicklit way back when, just because it was written by a woman, but it was in fact a mystery/thriller type of book. The same book (different cover, of course) is now sold in the mystery/thriller section. It all depends on the demographic the publisher is trying to reach. English YA is oftentimes no longer aimed at actual teens but pretty much at full adults (which is a serious issue, because it gets harder for teens to find age and reading level appropriate books).
my cover:
new cover:
I, too, would accept it as LN in this particular case. I think, it’s not a bad idea to simply put it up for discussion if whether or not something is LN is unclear. Personally, I’d rather err on the side of LN (i.e. including “novels” if they feel LNish) - I mean, in all seriousness, what exactly is the difference between a stand-alone LN and a novel? Marketing. Labeling. But the contents really can go either way.
I know I have a tendency to be irresponsible (not on purpose), so I’ve already prepared pace proposals just in case. With all the subchapters, even though they vary in length, it actually divides up pretty nicely.
Is there an ebook available?: yes (amzn.jp and bookwalker) Is there an audiobook available?: Not that I could find Is there an all-furigana version available?: no
Mayumi Doujima is a young girl who has been searching for a star that she saw only once ten years ago. She visits the headquarters of the Pretty Boy Detective Club where she meets five boys who are each unique in their own way. Her encounter marks the beginning of an extraordinary search for a lost star. A beautiful and dazzling mystery-adventure story starts now!
Content warnings if known
None that I know of, however I only watched the anime adaption and cannot speak for the LN
Why are you nominating this book: I fell in love with the anime while it was airing, and since then reading the series has been a long term goal of mine. Despite being written by Nisioisin, I rarely hear this series being talked about and think it could use some attention!
Looks like the auto-formatting Natively links are acting up a bit; they keep shifting on the nomination table. So just a heads up if you see funky stuff happening. Also, the table is now apparently scrollable and zoom in-able; first time I’ve seen that.
Ugh. I was hoping that would fix itself overnight. So there’s something funky going on here; dunno if it would help to tag @brandon, but I will just in case. So I removed the link from 美少年探偵団, saved the table, then added it again. It started showing up properly after that, but then 本好き’s link stopped rendering correctly. I said, well, screw it, I’ll just type in the title and hyperlink it so it looks like it’s working. And now 青春ブタ野郎は’s link isn’t showing right either. >.> I wonder if there’s some sort of limit on how many pure urls will render into a page title on a single post?
Yikes, I have no idea. I was able to get it to one box correctly when i input it alone, but not on one line, hmm. That implies there’s something probably cached wrong (I believe the cache hangs around for 24 hours)… so maybe try tomorrow? Not sure.
You all are saints trying to format that. Just imagine when we can do all this procedural stuff on the site rather than the forums
The easiest way I would say is read the description of the (currently) last book on Amazon and see if it says whether that’s the end, conclusion or however they put it of the series or not.