A Silent Voice

by Yoshitoki Ooima

Story summary: From the description of the first volume on Goodreads:
"Shoya is a bully. When Shoko, a girl who can’t hear, enters his elementary school class, she becomes their favorite target, and Shoya and his friends goad each other into devising new tortures for her. But the children’s cruelty goes too far. Shoko is forced to leave the school, and Shoya ends up shouldering all the blame. Six years later, the two meet again. Can Shoya make up for his past mistakes, or is it too late?"

Why You Will Like This Series:

• Complex people and relationships--messy like real life.
• Slow growth in friendship, self-respect, courage, and living.
• The realistic emotions the art managed to portray staggered me sometimes.
• The romance was pretty much the cutest thing ever, though not as important as even I wanted it to be.
• With only seven volumes, it's a nice and short and manageable read, and didn't continue past it's expiry date (unlike many series).

And Why You Might Not:

• This IS manga. A lot of people I know find it difficult enough to read normal graphic novels, let alone ones structured backwards to match the original language's format.
• I could see this being triggering to people who've struggled with depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, and the like.
• The ending is more open-ended than many people liked. (Not totally sure what I think of it myself.)

Fullmetal Alchemist

written and illustrated by Hiromu Arakawa

Grade: 4 1/2 stars
Story summary: Far too complicated to explain the whole thing. The gist of it is, there are two brothers who lost all or parts of their bodies through a dangerous alchemy experiment, and now they're searching for the philosopher's stone to help them get their bodies back. Also there are anthropomorphic personifications of the seven deadly sins, political intrigue and military overthrows, centuries-long plots, and really funny bonus strips at the back of each volume.

Thoughts: The plot! Wowee. I don't want to spoil too much about the plot details, but it seemed to me to be one of the more well-plotted series I've seen (including TV series). As far as I could tell, most of the questions were answered by the end. All the little things you'd forgotten about popped up again near the end and clicked with everything else.

And the characters! The main relationship of the series is the two brothers, Edward and Alphonse, which I love. Sibling relationships are always my favourite. Colonel Mustang is just one of the coolest people ever, and I'm thinking of writing a Top Ten (Or So) list of people associated with fire, mostly so he can be on it (with Zuko from A:TLA). Unlike Death Note, there are tons of great female characters as well. My favourite would Lt. Hawkeye. In fact, all the military characters were great, and I greatly appreciated the nuanced take on the military. They tend to be either decidedly the good guys or the bad guys in most things, while here they were very, very flawed good guys who contrasted nicely with the central brother characters. Here are the best of them, in their cool blue uniforms:

Whatever you do, by the way, don't just read the first volume and think, "Ah, this review was all nonsense," and never pick up the second volume. The first volume was by far my least favourite, and didn't seem to have much to do with the rest of the series.

Also, like Death Note, there is some philosophical weirdness, especially at the end. I might not bother with mentioning it, except that it centres around one of my top theological pet peeves. There is this view of God, which pops up all over the place, as essentially a creature--someone or something inside of creation that whose powers can be grasped and taken. Totally non-transcendent. Anyway, I can go on about this for ages, but I won't, because it only comes up in a few small places and didn't really detract from my reading pleasure. (However, you can read this article for clarification on what exactly I mean, if you want.)

Now, for your pleasure, the seven deadly sins incarnate. SPOILER ALERT FOR THIS PICTURE!!! (I hope it isn't already too late... Try to forget what you saw, ok? I know I shouldn't have put it up in the first place if I was going to say all this, but I couldn't help it! It was such a good picture! And they're so cool!)

Death Note

written by Tsugumi Ohba
illustrated by Takeshi Obata

Grade: 5 stars

For reasons that are still rather vague and unformed in my mind, I do not count graphic novels/manga/comic books when numbering the books I read each year. But it occurred to me for the first time the other day that this wouldn't necessarily stop me from reviewing them. So here goes.

Death Note is one of the coolest series I've read in a long time, and I'm including non-graphic series as well. It contains many of my favourite tropes: young, evil geniuses; Machiavellian characters; long battles of wits. What more could I ask for?

It's basically about a long series of mind games between Light Yagami, a boy who obtains the power to kill people by writing their names in a notebook (the Death Note of the title), and a young genius detective called simply "L". Light slowly gets more corrupted by the power of the Death Note, and L slowly closes in on him. And just when you think you might understand someone's plan, it turns out there was a whole other level going on above that the whole time. Awesome stuff.

Special praise also goes to the artist, Takeshi Obata. He's what got me into manga in the first place, with Hikaru no Go. His style is not as frantically busy as some manga tend to be, and a series as dark as this needs some realism in its art.

My main criticism is a lack of interesting girls. Any girls that did appear tended to be rather stupid, and have no purposes other than being in love with Light, and thus getting rather horribly used by him. The lack of good female characters did mean that there was no hackneyed Romance, which was nice. But I would also very much like some girls to add to my Evil Child Geniuses list someday.

It also gets into slightly weird philosophy by the end of it. Mostly this wasn't the focus of the story, though, so I was able to ignore it.