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View a preview of this book on Bookwalker
Welcome to 約束のネバーランド・The Promised Neverland Book Club!
We started reading volume 1 on 28th September 2024. See the table below for the links to the weekly threads.
Introduction
The Promised Neverland is a popular manga series, originally published in Weekly Shonen Jump between 2016 and 2020. The full series is published as 20 stand alone volumes, and it also spawned an impressive anime.
It tells the story of a group of children living together at an orphanage, the apparently idyllic Gracefield House and its surrounding estate. At first life seems fun and carefree but it quickly becomes clear that all is not right. Why do the children have numbers tattooed on their necks? Why do they undertake computerised tests? Why do they never leave the estate?
The children are soon going to learn a dark secret, the consequences of which will leave them needing to work together like never before.
View the original nomination post here
How it works
We create a reading schedule, with a set number of pages to work through each week. Each week we create a new discussion thread for that week’s reading. In those threads we discuss everything from vocab and grammar to the characters and story. We try to help each other by contributing to the shared vocab list, by answering each other’s questions and by keeping each other motivated.
What to expect from the this book
This book is on the harder end of the books we have tackled in the Beginner Book Club and is rated level 27 on Natively. The main characters are children, so a lot of the dialogue is spoken by or towards children (although quite intelligent children).
There is quite a lot of kanji usage but there is full furigana throughout which will generally make word look ups easier. You are occasionally going to get to practise some of your higher level WaniKani kanji (there’s a level 60 kanji right off the bat in panel 1) but a lot of kanji used are the commoner kanji.
This manga quite regularly uses a device where a word is written in kanji, but the furigana is for a different related word, that with a subtlety different meaning. For example the word for institution (home for orphans) 施設 is read as しせつ, but may instead have the furigana ハウス (meaning “house”). This is used in quite a lot of manga but struck me as quite common in this one.
If you are a complete beginner to Japanese then this is not for you. But if you have been learning Japanese for a while and getting into reading native material for the first time, then this will be a good book to read with the support of the group.
Trigger warnings (spoilers!) - child death, murder
How do I join in?
- Get yourself a copy of the book (see “Where to purchase” below)
- Click on the participation poll below to let us know you’re planning to join in
- Set this thread to “watching” so you get updates on the group (go just past the last post in this thread, click on the grey box that says “normal” or “tracking” and change this to “watching”)
Where to purchase
-
Physical
CD Japan, Amazon Japan, Comic Pixiv -
Digital
Bookwalker, Kobo
Schedule
| Date | Week | Chapter | Start page | End page | Total pages |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 28 Sep | Week 1 | 1 | 5 | 23 | 19 |
| 5 Oct | Week 2 | 1 | 24 | 39 | 16 |
| 12 Oct | Week 3 | 1 | 40 | 60 | 21 |
| 19 Oct | Week 4-5 | 2 | 61 | 86 | 26 |
| 26 Oct | Week 5-6 | 3 | 87 | 110 | 24 |
| 9 Nov | Week 7 | 4 | 111 | 130 | 20 |
| 16 Nov | Week 8 | 5 | 131 | 150 | 20 |
| 23 Nov | Week 9 | 6 | 151 | 170 | 20 |
| 30 Nov | 10 | 7 | 171 | 190 | 20 |
Vocabulary
Resources
- Jisho is a popular online Japanese-English dictionary.
- ichi.moe is a tool for parsing out sentences. You can type/paste in a whole sentence and it will try and break the sentence down into its individual parts.
- Deepl will translate a sentence from Japanese to English. It’s obviously not going to be right all the time, so if you want to check your translation it’s often better to ask in the thread.
Membership
Will you be reading with us?
- Yes
- Yes, but I might start late
- Maybe
- No
Which version will you be reading?
- Digital
- Physical
“What season 2?”
.
Listen, I went through a weird phase after this original nomination post where it just kinda fell in love with everything. (The movie is also very close to the anime/first book at least, but there’s a lot of complaints about Emma; but I feel like that’s for all movies based off books LOL)
