Plot/Story
Hiwatari Akitsune is a lazy high schooler. He's frequently late to class, sleeps during lessons, and can hardly be bothered to talk to his friends. However, he has a knack for appraising antique items, as his family owns an antique shop. His friends usually bring him old odds and ends they find to see if they have any value, if only to get Akitsune to talk to them.
One day on the train to school, Akitsune mistakes a paper bag with an antique watch in it for his lunch bag, both of which look identical. But the watch isn't any ordinary antique; it has the unique power to turn back time. He experiments with it a bit, restoring broken items, but is eventually found by someone who also has a unique item: a piece of chalk that can cut through anything. With the help of a young girl named List, Akitsune manages to escape, but loses an arm in the process. He desperately uses the watch to restore his arm, which works, but now the watch has fused with his wrist.
List says that the watch is called Aschenputtel, one of the Grimms' Fairy Tales that take the shape of mundane objects. Each one grants the user a special power relating to that particular fairy tale, some more useful than others. Someone had released them, and it's her job to locate and seal away the lost tools. In exchange for finding a way to remove the watch, Akitsune offers List his help in her search for the missing Fairy Tales.
But List isn't the only one looking for them. A sketchy organization is also collecting them for an unknown purpose, and by any means necessary. They've been causing no end of problems, so it's safe to say what their planning isn't good.
I was expecting Kataribe no List to follow a "Lost Item of the Week" format, but only in the beginning. There are two-hundred of them, so it would be difficult to keep track of each one, let alone the characters that may use them, and I imagine that would get boring really quickly. And it wouldn't make sense for these items to suddenly appear as the plot demands, anyways. How could someone come across any magical artifact and use it without some rumors surfacing about it? And people just suddenly start talking about it because, guess what guys, it's that time of the week again so happy hunting and all that? What the story does it does well, even though it can feel a bit slow, even contrived, in places.
Characters
The characters of Kataribe no List are the weakest part of the story to me. Save for one or two, they're not very interesting. Even when something bad happens to them it's not so much that I care that it happened to this particular person as it is that something bad happened to someone. It's not that I don't care about the characters, but they're not as interesting as I thought they would be, considering how slow-paced the story is. Even the antagonists have this problem. I guess it's fitting in a meta sense, since fairy tales aren't known for having complex characters.
Speaking of fairy tales, the actual personalities of the tools are far more interesting, at least when they get screen time. It helps to give insight into why they have the powers they do. In a way, you care more about the tools than the characters using them. It's almost like the author didn't know what to do with most of the characters, which is a shame.
Drawing Style
The art is all right, I can't really complain about it. It seems like something out of a shoujo manga, or at least inspired by it. Then again, I haven't read many shoujo manga, but the style still sticks with me. Thankfully it doesn't pull a lot of the things I would unfortunately expect to find in shoujo manga art. The character designs aren't too exaggerated in anatomy or detail, and everything is pleasing to the eye.
Where the art really shines is in the fairy tales themselves. Every so often, the story will show what happens in a particular story, to showcase why the tool behaves the way it does as well as the person using it. The settings here do capture that feeling of a fantasy story, from the gingerbread house in Hansel and Gretel to the castle in Cinderella.Though there aren't too many instances of of this happening, since not every tool's story is shown, I can't complain with what I got.
Also, the Wolf and the Seven Lambs is just adorable. Sad, but adorable. Just saying.
Enjoyment
My enjoyment varied; sometimes I was interested, other times I was bored. That aside, there wasn't anything that truly upset me, sans the lack of good character development. It's not something I'm eager to go of my way to read, but I'm glad I read it.
Overall
Kataribe no List is an interesting take on the classic Grimm fairy tales. Though the characters weren't very intriguing, the story is what made me read on. I wanted to see what was going to happen next, where everything was going to lead. I was especially interested in what the worlds of the different fairy tales would look like, as they're probably the best part. Although Kataribe no List has it's flaws, it's still something worth reading.