I read this years ago and tried giving it another shot, out of curiosity, and it's so terrible I can't even read it out of "this was written for young children but is still Sailor Moon". For the record, this will do nothing for you if you are reading this with your kids, because this is based on the Americanized Frankenstein's monster first US dub of the first anime, that pretends that the characters live in some vague version of 80s/90s America rather than Japan, and drastically changes just about everything about who they are and how the world works. Rather than help younger folks understand the characters, it will make them more confused, because it's likely that the most easy to reach version of the first anime for kids to watch these days is thankfully the uncensored, unmodified sub or dub of the show, which directly contradicts this in almost every way.

On the first page of this book, they have this sentence: "Serena's favorite animals were rabbits, which is why some friends gave her the nickname, "Bunny.""

Serena is the name the US dub company gave the protagonist because they tried to Americanize anime back then, and Serena is a more "familiar" name to presumably white audiences. The protagonist's name is Usagi. Usagi is the Japanese word for rabbit/bunny. That's why people call her bunny words. That's why she's got so much bunny stuff. On top of her hair style, which is two buns that lead into long tails on either side of her head, kind of like bunny ears. She's also Sailor Moon, which aligns with the moon rabbit folk tale (Makoto actually makes a joke about this when they go to the moon). This painful rewrite is just that: painful. There are multiple shows right now with "Usagi" in the title that star rabbits or are otherwise rabbit themed, including one show on Netflix that stars a samurai rabbit. This is not a difficult concept for children to grasp, and yet these "tweaks" and changes are endemic to this. Maybe Usagi's favorite animal is a rabbit, too, and that is actually why her friends go so hard on the rabbit stuff. But she's so buried in other rabbit stuff it's kind of unavoidable.

Don't read this to your kids. If you really love all Mooniebilia, sure, go for it. Maybe you can get through the cringe in a way I can't. The "GQ-looking henchmen" and Dennis the Menace reference were just too much for me. ( )

Well it wasn't dreadful but it was just so blah. Serena was just vapid and errors leaped out at me from the page. There were even parts of sentences missing. This would work as the script for a graphic novel or a TV show where more of the interesting details could be introduced by the artist. ( )

This small chapter book is a written version of the TV show Sailor Moon popular in the late 90s, early 00s. The story is about a clumsy teenager, Serena, who finds out she is a magical super Hero, Sailor Moon. The book is basically a summarization of the American TV series, but leaves out major chunks of it. The writing itself isn't all that bad. It is an easy chapter book. And the characters are familiar to anyone who knows the series. It has many of the themes of fantasy, magic, super heroes, super evils. The main theme is the good vs evil, in which good always wins. What is really bad is the storyline... Half the time it makes no sense. Also there are spelling errors which shouldn't be in a book period. This book is written for ages 8 and up. ( )