Pick of the Litter Volume 1
The kind of shojo manga that can induce sugar shock in the uninitiated, Suda's comedy follows 15-year-old Riku Fukagawa, a kindhearted student with an infallible sixth sense, who discovers that he's actually a transplant from another world: Yamato, a magical land that resembles the Japan of several hundred years ago. Riku's very odd family (including a rabbit-eared brother who communicates only through handwritten signs) lives in Yamato, and he commutes from Japan to work at their family store, selling magic items such as live soap bubbles, although adapting to his new environment isn't easy. For one thing, the store's welcoming cat statue turns out to be made of holy-spirit stone, and it's got a disgruntled and rather unusual holy spirit inside it. (And—wouldn't you know it?—Riku's magic power turns out to be freeing spirits from captivity.) The book's got a big, daffy ensemble cast, lots of goofy ideas and a hypercute art style: word balloons occasionally end with hearts, and characters are surrounded by flowers as design elements. But Suda's better at ramping up the story's cuteness than at propelling the plot forward, and its whimsical details sometimes undermine its bigger jokes and even its storytelling; the occasional action sequences are nearly impossible to follow.(Sept.)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.