The Night Parade
by -alex-
The Night Parade follows the adventures of a young Japanese teenager as she navigates the real and spiritual realms of a traditional village. If you're a fan of films like Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away then you'll find lots to love here.
On a fateful summer vacation, young Saki leaves her friends and the city behind to visit her grandmother in the family’s ancestral village. Caught between a Buddhist temple and a Shinto shrine, Saki’s grandmother’s house becomes the jumping-off point in a wild adventure through the human and spirit worlds when Saki accidentally triggers a death curse. Who can you trust when the local spirits and the neighborhood teenagers all have agendas of their own? Can Saki break the curse in time, or will doom fall on her family and on the colorful cast of spirits she’s met along the way? With only three nights to make things right, Saki finds herself locked in a race against time.
Author Kathryn Tanquary deftly mixes the real-world truth of depopulation and decline in rural communities all across Japan, along with tribulations of family life that would be recognizable to everyone who has ever been a kid or a teenager. Added to this is a thrilling, sometimes funny and always heart-warming odyssey through ordinary mountain paths and an infinitely grander, far stranger world hiding just slightly beyond what we can see.
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