Fairy Cube 3

I give up!  I don’t really understand much of what’s going on in this series.  It’s really messy.  I mean, I like what I can tell is going on, that the humans are congregating and causing the faeries to gather and it will cause a gate to open and the main character is the key… but the nuts and bolts of the thing, that somehow this was engineered by a superbeing called Balgor, that he was assisted by a girl who hates people, and that she was assisted by Tokage, and both of them regret their decisions when it comes down to it… I just don’t understand!  And Tokage and Ian’s mother reappears and… this is the catalyst, for some reason, and… Tokage gets… powers?  Or not?  Or something?  Kaito has a few more rounds of both bad and good in him, I guess?

I’m sure it would make some sense if I sat down and read all three together.  I’m told it’s not that hard to figure out, and I can understand that.  I think my problem is that the story didn’t slow down enough to linger on the details, and the best thing it has going for it are the little details that put an Irish fantasy spin on everything.  I love the story, and I love the setting… but somehow it just doesn’t seem right that the entire last volume of a series about faeries is a huge, epic action scene.  Or, at least, it doesn’t seem right as the third and last volume.  I don’t know.

It does have a cute last page, though.  I liked the eventual outcome a lot.

There’s a short story/followup at the end that I liked much, much better than the content of the actual series.  In it, two characters are sort of busting these evil spirits that tie into the plot of the main series.  The two carryover characters only appear as cameos, sort of at the end of the story.  The main plot involves a ghost that haunts a photo booth and grants wishes to girls who can see her.  The wishes come true in the end, always, but the payoff is that the girls are killed so that they can spend forever being the ghost’s friend.  For instance, the story is introduced when a girl is killed by a bus, which amputates her legs.  That girl’s wish is to be shorter.  Another girl makes a series of wishes against her backstabbing best friend, and things go from there.  I would actually have loved to read this as a full series.

So yes, I like Fairy Cube in theory.  I mostly wound up frustrated with what the story was and what it could have been, especially given the quality and scale of Angel Sanctuary.  But I liked the short followup!

This was a review copy provided by Viz.