The Place Promised in Our Early Days

Great novelization here. Story expands on the anime quite a bit. As a Japanese-English bilingual, though, I must say that this translation is overly literal. This is not the fault of the translator, however (she's done good, accurate work here and elsewhere), but the publisher "Yen Press" and the editors who work there have the unfortunate tendency to stick *so close* to the Japanese originals that they make all their light novels sound like translation-ese. This is not to say that their novels sound like Google Translate (they don't), but nor do they sound like something a novelist who was a native speaker of English would write.It's unfortunate that Yen Press gets most of the good light novel licenses only to have editors that enforce the most by-the-books literal translations that compromise on artistic quality in the name of adhering to some false sense of "fidelity".If English is the only language you can read in, it's okay, but I recommend reading the Japanese original over this if you can.