Do people think this is a good native book for reading practice when you normally read learner books and struggle with manga and its casual language?
Book 1 and 2
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The publisher has a pretty decent sample free to read on their website with two complete chapters (click the white 試し読みする button) so you can see what it’s like and how you’d do with it. It doesn’t have manga style slang or spoken contractions. It does have a lot of vocabulary written in kana, not kanji, as is common for books aimed at this age group (e.g. かぞく not 家族, いえ not 家, くろい not 黒い) which you might find makes reading it unexpectedly difficult if you’re used to using kanji as a guide to meaning. (But it makes for good practice in some ways: listening doesn’t have kanji to help you 
)
I think the main question is whether you would find the book interesting to work through. That depends a lot on you: as adults, people vary a lot in how much tolerance they have for reading materials aimed at children. My suggestion is that that you try the two chapters in the free sample and see how you get on with them.
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I can’t understand the site to find the sample but I can’t exactly start with native adult books
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No worries, here’s a screenshot with the button circled:
If you click that button (it’s labelled 試し読みする) it will put you into a web browser based reader showing the sample of the book; you can swipe right to move to the next page and left to move backwards. (This is a screenshot of the mobile browser view of the site, but I think the desktop view is basically the same if you’re using a computer.)
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I’ve ordered it cause it will hopefully help with vocabulary even if I will have to constantly look things up. Will probably be boring but need to start with something easier. I want the mysterious candy shop but it’s higher level and was too expensive on Amazon Japan
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Looking at the sample it does seem to be very accessible but it does have the drawbacks of books that are aimed at young Japanese natives and not foreigners learning the language: they don’t really account for the same things.
In particular the book assumes that the reader will know how to speak basic Japanese fluently but not read well and in particular not know too many kanji, but for us gaikokujins it’s not always appropriate. For me it’s often easier to read kanji-heavy prose with advanced kanji than pure kana.
I think for your average WaniKani crowd, words like だれ、よむ、どくしょ or ねがって would be easier to read as 誰、読む、読書 and 願って respectively. At least it’s true for me. Also I’m not sure why 読んで is spelled with kanji but then よむ is written in kana twice after.
EDIT: oh, @pm215 already said that above, I skipped the comment for some reason. Woops.
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Publisher choices on this kind of thing can be weird and seem rather random to me sometimes. I recently read a book where a word was used three times in a sentence and was given furigana on the third occurrence only. That’s quite extreme but I feel like “furigana not on the first occurrence of a word but on a later one” is not uncommon. Certainly the publishers don’t seem to be applying furigana automatically or according to any fixed rules.
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