Book Review- Sugary Girls: The Art of Eku Uekura (Japanese Edition) by Edu Uekura

For many years, I enjoyed collecting art books. I own art books from movies, artists, and other media. As someone who has always loved art, I loved collecting them.

Since the 2020 Covid pandemic, I have substantially slowed down in collecting art books. This is mostly because there isn’t very many new art books I wanted to collect. One of the new books that caught my eye was Sugary Girls, The Art of Eku Uekura. It is an art book of girls wearing clothing inspired by deserts by Japanese artist Eku Uekura. Even though I have owned this book for more than a year, I decided to write a post about it now. To be honest, the only reason why I didn’t talk about it is because I wanted to enjoy looking at it without worrying about thinking up what to say in a review post.

Eku Uekura is a Japanese artist based in Tokyo. Her most notable work is on the light novel Little Witch Academia: The Nonsensical Witch and the Country of Fairies. (The light novel is based off the anime, Little Witch Academia) She was the illustrator for the novel and designed three new characters for the story. Since the publication of the Little Witch Academia light novel, she has released two art books (That I know of) featuring her personal art. Sugary Girls is the second of these art books.

This is what the front cover of Sugary Girls looks like…

The book comes with a dust jacket and is a paperback book. I purchased mine from Amazon.

This is what two of the first few pages of the book look like…

The book is mostly written in Japanese. Even though I don’t read, write, or speak Japanese, the language barrier was not as big a problem as it could be. Since it is an art book, I was able to navigate through it pretty easily. Also, there is enough English in it for me to figure out where everything is located and any important notes about the illustrations and book in general.

The book is split into sections. These sections can be seen in the “Menu” page, which also serves as a table of contents…

The Preface is written in both Japanese and English…

Each of the chapters in the book focus on a food inspired theme. For an example, Chapter 1 is called Sweet x Fresh…

Here are some of the illustrations from the Chapter 1, Sweet x Fresh…

 

And here are some of the illustrations from Chapter 2, Special Sweets…

At the end of the book is a section dedicated to the creation of the illustrations featured in the book…

I really love this book. It is so cute and pretty! The illustrations are detailed, beautifully colored and shaded, and do not include anything obscene or objectionable. Just clean and adorable illustrations! I also love that there are English translations along side the Japanese captions throughout the book. The English translations are not everywhere, but they are located in enough places that it helps the non Japanese speaker read and understand the book better.

I highly recommend this book to anyone looking for an art book featuring anime/manga style art. Since it features clean art, it is great for younger teens and even children. For me, it is a 5 out of 5 art book of an artist’s original art.

 

That’s all for now! Thank you for reading!