Days on fes vol 1 by Kanato oka

Kanade is a normal high school girl with favorite banda she likes to listen to. Her friend, Otoha, one day invites her to a music festival because one of Kanade’s favorite bands is going to be playing. Otoha has been to many festivals before, but Kanade has no idea what she’s in store for. She turns out to love every moment of it, including discovering other bands she's never heard of. Otoha’s older brother, Gaku, also loves going to festivals and often goes with his employee and friend, Ritsuru. Gaku can be a lot to handle, and Ritsuru can be pretty self-deprecating. The four decide to go to an overnight festival where there will be camping involved, as well as several days and many stages. Ritsuru reluctantly agrees to go with, if for no other reason than to save innocent Kanade and Otoha from Gaku's perfectionism in setting up the campsite.

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This is a very comforting, but slow-paced story. The chapter with Ritsuru and Gaku at past festivals was my favorite as the two friends are complete foils of each other, and we learn way more about those two characters than the rest of the chapters with the girls. My least favorite thing was the amount of fonts used. There were at least 6 different fonts - some of them were to express an emotion, some were assigned as the main speaking font for a specific character, and some were seemingly arbitrary. If every character had their own font and there was something else used to show excitement or other emotions, it would make a little more sense and probably not bother me as much, but it got to the point in this volume where it pulled me out of the story. 

The art is pretty detailed and captures moments of what it's like to be at music festivals, but they spend relatively little time illustrating the musicians and playing of music. The covers are gorgeous, though.

So far in this first volume, there's nothing inappropriate for teen readers. Ritsuru does drink alcohol at the festival. There's overall not much of a plot to this story, so this might have limited appeal to fans of comfort reads or music-lovers. 

Sara's Rating: 7/10
Suitability Level: Grades 9-12

Publisher: Yen Press
Publication Date: February 23, 2021
ISBN: 9781975319618 (Paperback)

​Tags: Rating: 7/10, Suitability: High School, Manga, Music, School Life, Friendship, Iyashikei, Yen Press