Apple Children of Aeon

I add a lot of manga to my tbr without leaving myself notes so the source of the recommendation and the reason I felt compelled to add it sometimes eludes me. Apple Children of Aeon was a one of these entries and I loved it. It's a heartbreaking but beautiful story of family, isolation, and loss.

Apple Children of Aeon is a great blend of romance, mystery, and a bit of folk horror. Yukinojo arrives to the small apple farming community as an outsider, a role he has felt he's been in his whole as a foundling child left outside as a baby. This outsider position leads to an unfortunate incident that forces him to unravel a mystery among the village.

Yukinojo is such an interesting character, seeing how he carries this weight of being adopted and feeling disconnected from his adopted family and his new family. To him, these familial ties are delicate and any mistake on his part might disconnect them for good. To finally forge a connection to another with his marriage of convenience to Asahi and for that to be put in peril leads him to spiral and become desperate, putting himself and the village in risk, it was so well done and had me enraptured.

I think I cried the entire back half of the last volume...their romance really got to me

It's not as menacing as other folk horror stuff, but the unsettling vibe and the secret at the heart of the village definitely scratches that itch

In writing this I found out Ai Tanaka also wrote King in Limbo which I read a few years ago and did like