Illustrated by Hiromu Arakawa
Arslan is the crown prince of the kingdom of Pars. His country is constantly at war because they must protect the trade routes that run through their cities, which leads to Pars being prosperous but also the envy of many nations. Neighboring countries also oppose Pars for religious differences, believing that all the heathens living in Pars must be exterminated. Arslan's father is an adept battle commander, and he never loses. At 14, Arslan rides out to his first battle against this nation of ideologically opposed soldiers, and it does not go well for the soldiers of Pars. Arslan is forced to flee is once-prosperous kingdom, and now he must journey to reclaim his kingdom.
0 Comments
Hana is a precocious young girl who doesn’t usually do as she’s told and has many adventures with her friends. First, Hana prepares her emergency “rations” of choco-puffs, which she leaves at her school. When a typhoon hits her town, she takes her cat down to her school to retrieve the rations in the storm. In another adventure, Hana and her friend sit in an abandoned VW Bug, when a dam breaks and carries them downstream to the sea. Later, Hana gets stuck in a hammock and her friends have to get her out before a corporation, bent on reclaiming some derelict fields, torch the whole place and Hana along with it.
Long ago, witches were persecuted and killed and blamed for all the wrong in society. Those who survived the fires of the stakes became the power behind many countries, allying themselves with kings and world rulers in order to stay alive. Now, these witches are indispensable and must be trained at an elite school. Alice is a top witch at the school, and she gets paired up with Mari, a seemingly talentless, nearly human who fails at everything and falls asleep in class constantly. While mentoring Mari, Alice discovers Mari’s immense power: she can resurrect. The other students become jealous of the amount of time Alice is spending with Mari, so they summon a demon to get rid of her. What they didn’t anticipate is that Alice may have started falling in love with Mari, which is forbidden for witches - they’ll lose their powers if they ever fall in love!
Illustrated by Arielle Jovellands
Two astronauts fight against a harsh environment and each other after their ship collided with an asteroid and crashed on the planet’s surface. Harper North, the lead scientist, and the team’s survival expert are the only survivors. The ship’s emergency shuttle crashes around 100 kilometers away, so it’s a race against each other and the deadly summer sun and acid rains to see who can get to the one-person shuttle first. The team came to this deadly planet in search of a special flower with properties that can help an unknown sickness on Earth, but the tragedy of the crash and loss of the rest of the crew bring out the worst in North and her surviving shipmate.
Caiman and Nikaido live in The Hole, a place where sorcerers go to practice magic on unsuspecting humans. Caiman has his head transformed into that of a lizard, and now he and Nikaido are trying to track down the sorcerer who did it. If they can kill him, the spell will be reversed, and Caiman will go back to normal. Nikaido also runs an eatery called The Hungry Bug, and Caiman works for a doctor’s office specializing in helping the victims of sorcerers. In this way, both gather leads on sorcerers working around The Hole so they can track them down. En, the head of the sorcerers, is also looking for the sorcerer who changed Caiman, but he still had to do something to stop Caiman and Nikaido from killing sorcerers. He sends in a team of “fixers, the ones who usually cleans up messes, to deal with Caiman and Nikaido.
Twins Alec and Walker spend their last summer before college at their cousin’s home in the Southern United States. But, Alec was in the middle of some really in-depth experiments on plants and memory, so he’s brought them with him. When the dogs get into the boxes, they slowly start to change into the plants Alec has been experimenting on. Walker is a socialite and tries to get introverted Alec to join the party scene, but Alec isn’t interested in being with people. Alec makes one friend, another student using the school science lab over summer, and she shares her research on an extremely old oak tree that has been in the town since its founding. A boneheaded prank destroys a prized plant, and Alec uses puts his experimental formula into action to save what he can.
Illustrated by Bex Glendining
In this title, readers are presented with details of the life of sculptor Mary Edmonia Lewis, a woman of Native American and African American descent. Her educational journey was distinctly and full of prejudice and false assumptions, so she wasn’t allow to finish college. She felt drawn to sculpting, and tried to find a teacher under whom she could apprentice. After several re-elections, she finally found someone who would train her in the art of bust-making. When buying busts became less fashionable, she moved to Rome to fully immerse herself in the art form. While in Rome, she was criticized for spending money on piano lessons and attending parties of the elite, but, arguably, she had to associate herself worth the people who were more likely to buy sculptures. Her most famous work is the Death of Cleopatra, which was almost lost to time and weather when it was placed outside the entrance to a horse racing track.
Black Panther (2016), Vol 3: A Nation under our feet, part 3, illustrated by Brian Stelfreeze and Chris Sprouse
T’Challa and Shuri take on the two prongs of this Wakandan Civil War, but one at a time. First, T’Challa gets the philosopher Changamire to see how his teachings have led to this moment, and Changamire gives T’Challa some other advice about kingship that sticks with him. Then T'Challa and Shuri go after Tetu and Zenzi, and they must win over the men Zenzi is controlling with her powers. With Tetu out of the picture, Zenzi flees the country, presumably to regroup and come back to wage new war against T'Challa. Now, the only thing left is to confront the Midnight Angels, the fallen Dora Milaji, and have them come to terms with their choices and what they are demanding.
Illustrated by DaNi
Octavia (Vee) and Eldora (El) are high school seniors in the town of Shudder-to-Think, Pennsylvania. Their coal-mining town is plagued with sinkholes full of fire that filled the coal mines ages ago, and the holes and soot claim many lives throughout the town. Nevertheless, people can't seem to leave Shudder-to-Think, guilty of leaving their dead behind in shoddily marked graves empty of inhabitants, swallowed by even more sinkholes. Aside from the soul-sink that is the town, something else strange is going on that seems to affect townspeople intermittently - they forget whole swaths of time, hours, days, or more, and can't account for their whereabouts nor their actions. Vee and El enlist the the help of the local witch, who knows more about all of these strange phenomenon that she lets on. The truth is horrifying, and each victim of the forgetting disorder is faced with a pivotal choice - to keep forgetting, or to face the horrible truth of the nature of their town.
Black Panther (2016), Vol 2: A Nation Under our Feet part 2, illustrated by Chris Sprouse, Don McGregor, Rich Buckler, Brian Stelfreeze
T’Challa enlists the help of some other marvel super heroes to confront his enemies. He’s trying to keep the rebellion down on too many fronts, and the anarchists, Tetu and Zenzi, are starting to gather more followers to them. The rogue Dora Milaje have gathered the rest of their sisters-in-arms to also usurp the king, but they haven’t figured out who would replace T'Challa yet. Meanwhile, Shuri, still in her coma, is working through stories inside the Djalia, the plane of Wakandan memory, with her “mother,” a culmination of the queens of Wakanda. Shuri doesn’t quite know the meaning of the stories she’s learning, but they will probably make sense to what’s happening in Wakanda without her. |
About MeI've been reading manga and comicbooks for years. Now, I write reviews and other helpful things for School Librarians, teachers, parents, and students. Search this siteRatings, Audience, and Subject Tags
All
Archives
April 2024
|