James Nicoll Reviews

The Book of Heroes
Miyuki Miyabe (Trans. Alexander O. Smith)
VIZ/Haikasoru
$23.99 USA/ $32.00 CAN/£16.99
352 pages
ISBN: 978 – 1421527758

There are definite similarities between this book and Brave Story but I enjoyed this one more.

Once again, we have a young protagonist who finds themselves caught up a mundane crisis that becomes entangled with supernatural matters; Yuriko Morisake is sent home from school, where she learns that her older brother committed a violent assault on his schoolmates, killing one outright, and is now missing. Nobody has any idea why 14-year-old Hiroki would do this; a popular, accomplished student, he doesn’t seem the sort to suddenly snap.

Unsurprisingly the explanation has a fantastic element, one that ties into what begins as a faintly disturbing cosmology that with time becomes much worse: 

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Brave Story
Miyuki Miyabe (Trans. Alexander O. Smith)
VIZ/Haikasoru
$16.99 USA/$23.00 CAN/£9.99
816 pages
ISBN: 978 – 1421527734

This begins with a Weird Crap Accumulates plot that gets run over an entirely mundane crisis and then moves on from there:

Timid, self-doubting fifth grader Wataru Mitani slowly becomes aware that there’s something extremely peculiar about the never-finished Daimatsu building and his schoolmate Mitsuru, a young man who is far more popular than Wataru and who appears to be in every way Wataru’s superior. Peculiar escalates into extremely weird as Wataru encounters what appears to be a genuine wizard and witnesses Mitsuru feeding some local bullies to a demonic figure (for good reason but it is something of an overreaction).

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