[Very slight spoilers ahead. Careful.] 
 A little while ago, forsaking my credit card bill, and the fact that I work 25 hours a week at minimum waaaahhhhhhhgg... 
 Ugh, I should just stop. In the last six months or so I began throwing handfuls of copper coins at things like potato scones and cigarettes and PS40 Ryanair flights to mystery destinations. The absolute best thing about Ryanair is that it is SO janky and SO cheap and you never know quite where you're going, you just know you're getting on whatever flight is cheapest, landing near whatever hostel is cheapest, so that you can spent five days waffling around drinking local beer and talking to Australians or Americans who have their lives together. 
 Americans and Australians who travel almost always have their lives together. They weren't the ones who threw the contents of their swear jar at an unplanned trip to an unplanned destination and only got the time off by calling in sick to work from Malta ("I have swine flu, I can't come in, ignore the sounds of softly cawing gulls and Maltese people laughing at the sun-drenched bus stop behind me"). Americans and Australians who travel are brave souls who have saved up for extortionate flights and they've spent $$$ on planning and guidebooks and making sure that they make the most of travelling to the other side of the world. I salute them so hard. They are so organised and I am a human disaster. 
 I live in the UK, so my privileged ass only needs to be verbally abused by elderly people to whom I serve coffee and fried food for a while, get a shite pay check, chip away very slightly at a growing stack of bills, then buy a ticket for PS9.99 on a flying tin can and within four hours I'm staggering someplace new. 
 This was how I ended up in Berlin, inappropriately dressed, with five days worth of living supplies stuffed into a backpack I bought on Etsy. That backpack has been there for me. It was there when I cried in Halifax airport and when I nearly got the cops called on me on the Berlin subway and when I had to use very, very alternate methods of wipage in the bathrooms at the cyber park in Marrakech. I DO NOT HAVE 10 DIRHAM FOR TOILET PAPER. I AM NOT THAT PREPARED. 
 So when I was in Berlin, at a bad time of year to be there, when it snowed every day and the hostel scene was sparse because who the fuck goes to Berlin in winter, I met this older woman, and it was her sixty-fifth birthday so she gave me some birthday cake and a huge shot of cognac. She told me about how she had been moving from hostel to hostel for the past few weeks, because her upstairs neighbours in her apartment block were cooking meth. She was from Berlin, an absolutely lovely woman, and she said something that captures the city so perfectly. So sweetly. I could not have said it better myself. 
 "Berlin. I love it and I hate it." 
 This book. 
 I love it and I hate it. 
 It's this sort of Frankenstinian thing, this lumbering creature that you can't grab a hold of, so when it wanders off the straight and narrow and down a plot line that makes absolutely no sense, all you can really do is shrug and say, "Oh, okay." 
 On one hand, it so beautifully captures how bloody exhausting it is not only to enter a country whose culture is different to yours, but to live there. I remember feeling the way Katie does, staggering home after attending foreign high school where I am the foreigner, and feeling so emotionally and physically drained and anxious that I'd collapse into bed and sleep the rest of the afternoon away like an elderly woman. Or like a hamster. 
 Katie is spunky, she's sharp. She does dumb shit because said dumb shit moves the plot along, but her core characterisation is so enjoyable. She's not afraid to climb trees and confront the guys who look up her skirt when she does. She's so dry but sensitive and she really cares about shit - like, she cares about people's feelings. 
 But the problem lies with Tomohiro, and how great his characterisation was at the beginning, before it got creepy and problematic, then irritatingly saccharine. I get that he's loyal, and I also get that he's afraid of himself so he feels like he has to push people away to protect them, but couldn't he just have told Katie that she breeds with the mouth of a goat? Did he have to make her think he was a rapist? What the ever loving fuck is that all about? 
 How weird! How problematic! How... Did I already say weird? And not in a good way! In a "let's back away slowly because this is getting wildly out of hand" kind of way! 
 The mythology was this book's saving grace - honest to god, it's the only thing saving it from being a total shit show. If this had been about vampires, I'd have flushed it down the toilet. But Kami are new to me, and this particular magical element was something I'd never come across before. It was fresh and exciting to me, and beautifully rendered in action. The way Tomohiro draws, almost shamefully, with an air of fear about him, was painful and beautiful. But did the bloody Yakuza really need to come into this? Did they really? Are you serious with this? Why? 
 But this is my tussle with this book: it's so lovable and yet so fucking hateable too. The artwork is gorgeous, but the villains are ridiculous, to the point of being comical. I really liked Katie, but Tomohiro was such a clusterfuck! The setting was gorgeously written, with so much heart, but then there were car chases and mobsters and other such silly gimmicky crap! I loved Katie's relationship with her aunt, but she treated Yuki like shit! 
 And that girl was only ever nice to her! 
 At the end of the day, this is your average YA formula with a few really cool, interesting embellishments. It's a big tangle of wasted potential, which is such a shame. It's like going somewhere new and exciting, but knowing that in order to get you there, Ryanair will starve you and freeze you half to death before slamming you down with such force on the runway at the other end that your ass actually leaves the seat. 
 Outhie. I bih my thung.