Library Wars 2

Kiiro Yumi – Viz – 2010 – 6+ volumes

What a fun concept! A shoujo manga about a kind of library army that fights the government and others to make sure that reading materials at the library aren’t censored. It gets bogged down in shoujo manga plot devices a little bit, but that doesn’t stop it from being a pretty cool little series.

I skipped the first volume, but the plot of the series isn’t hard to figure out, and the first chapter in the book re-introduces the storyline and all the characters. I have a hard time telling Dojo and Tezuka apart, since both are in Iku’s unit and are apparently love interests (?), but otherwise everything went very smoothly. I love it when series make it easy to step in from anywhere.

The story picks up in the middle of Iku’s training. Not long in, she experiences her first raid, and winds up having to protect books that are nearly censored from inside the library itself. Later, there are major PR issues surrounding a librarian who refuses to bend the patron privacy law concerning a murder suspect, and Iku has to keep her cool while the things she believes in are insulted. Among all this, one of the boys suddenly asks her out, and she seems to be falling for another.

One of the things that got on my nerves is that no matter what else is happening, someone is saying something bad about Iku. It’s always treated like a joke, and she seems to take all of it in stride, but it get old and repetitive very fast, and it’s frustrating when the flow of the story is constantly interrupted by these unfunny scenes. Similarly, it doesn’t seem to blend its shoujo and action elements all that well. The library parts and all the politics are pretty awesome, and I can see all of that going interesting places, but currently that aspect is taking a backseat to a frustratingly by-the-book shoujo love story that has nothing at all to do with it.

Iku’s a pretty average heroine. She’s clumsy, not good at a lot of things, gets wound up easily, and is great at what she does in a pinch. She’s flustered at the smallest hint of romantic attention, and seems oblivious to her own feelings. It looks like she also became a library agent to follow after a man who helped her when she was younger. I know Iku inside and out, because she’s been in a thousand manga before. It doesn’t seem like there’s much to characterize Iku in this series yet, other than the great scene where she suddenly turns into a good agent. The same goes for Dojo, who’s a pretty typical tease-y know-it-all guy who helps Iku out while possibly harboring a secret crush on her. Two other characters, Tezuka and Iku’s roommate, were more interesting than their stereotypes. The roommate doesn’t have much of an opportunity to shine, but this book focuses heavily on Tezuka, a boy who wants to be the perfect soldier but still has flaws. He seems to have a hard time expressing himself too, and appears to defer to superiors in all matters. It’s hard to like the other characters, since so much of their time is spent teasing Iku, but what I saw of Tezuka made me want to learn more about him in a serious context.

It is a very cool read though, and it gets major points for its concept. When the teasings gets too much, suddenly things pick up with a great action scene where Iku gets to be the hero, followed by a random love confession. The middle part was the most interesting, and the strength of that part will likely keep me coming back for more. It’s hard not to pick this up on concept alone, and it does have its weaknesses, but if the series manages to straighten all that out, it could turn into something spectacular.

This was a review copy provided by Viz.