In Volume 1, we met Akira, a withdrawn loner and Pure, an outgoing and positive transfer student who tells Akira that she’s from the future where they are lovers.  In Volume 2, Akira slowly and surely grows to love Pure, only to find that the other girl has disappeared.

In Strawberry Fields Once Again, Volume 3, we find ourselves in a cascading series of fractured timelines. As we watch Pure and Akira miss each other over and over, we begin to pick up the thread of the story and it turns out that indeed Pure was from the future!

Akira and her brother Ruri, after the death of their mother, each chose to withdraw from life in a slightly different way. Akira dedicated herself to otome games and unbeknownst to her, Ruri dedicated himself to repairing what he believed was the true timeline. But – and this is really an important point in real, life, I think – Ruri only sees his parents from a child’s point of view and doesn’t account for them having lives as adults that he’s not privy to. From his immature and self-serving perspective, the timeline he’s seeking to restore is the “correct” one…but as we learn, there is no timeline in which his family is restored in the way he wishes.  But selfishly, he puts his energy towards stopping Pure, rather than himself, becoming what passes as this series’ bad guy.

When Ruri is confronted with this truth, he relents and Pure and Akira finally meet up after a series of failures in Pure’s time-travel attempts.

In the end, the timeline for Pure and Akira are restored enough for them to find one another and be married, and what started out as a kind of weird little typical school drama, ends as a weird little time-travel story with a Yuri wedding and a happy ending for mostly everyone.

So yeah, this book travels a long distance from that first chapter, but now that we’re here at the end, it was definitely an interesting ride. In Japanese I ended up reading this volume through 3 times, just to make absolutely sure I understood it and, if I had not, I probably would have had to read this English-volume through more than once. ^_^ Amanda Haley does a fine job on the translation, so it’s not on her – honestly a very excellent job, as she helped me clear up some small details I had missed or ignored, and I enjoyed the clean look of Abigail Blackman’s lettering – also, not credited, but whomever did the editing, nice job! (Yen, could you please give folks credit when they work on a book? ) The rough-texture of the cover stock is intriguing addition, I think this series might have been better served by glossy, but I kinda like the feel of this anyway.

Overall, a strange little series that was totally worth reading.  ^_^

Ratings:

Art – 7
Story – 8
Character – 7
Service – 2
Yuri – 6

Overall – 7

The main weakness of the story was character, it was very hard to actually like anyone until after you understood the whole picture and by then, it was too late for about half of them. ^_^;