Booklist review
Sara's Rating: 7/10 Suitability Level: Grades 9-12 Publisher: VIZ Media Publication Date: July 8, 2025 ISBN: 9781974756049 (Paperback) Tags: Rating: 7/10, Suitability: High School, Manga, Action Adventure, Humor, Mythology, VIZ Media
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Booklist review
Sara's Rating: 7/10 Suitability Level: Grades 7-12 Publisher: Yen Press Publication Date: July 22, 2025 ISBN: 9798855409604 (Paperback) Tags: Rating: 7/10, Suitability: Middle School, Suitability: High School, Manga, Action Adventure, Supernatural, Family, Humor, Yen Press 
Three aspiring agents of Death come together (eventually) at school and learn to be better collectors of souls. For two characters, Maka and Black Star, they are on a mission to create an ultimate weapon for Death, and to do so, they need to collect 99 souls of humans and one witch, which they feed to their weapons. Their weapons also can become anthropomorphic entities with strong personalities that must match their weapon-masters soul energy. Otherwise, wielding them is nearly impossible. Our third character is none other than Death’s son — Death the Kid — a reaper with a powerful pair of guns as his weapons.
Adapted by Suzuka Oda
Mayumi had been searching for a mysterious star she saw when she was four years old, and her obsession had fueled her dream to become an astronaut. But years of dead ends and nagging from her parents have caused her to all but give up her dream, something she’s decided to do on the day of her fourteenth birthday. The day before is when she fatefully meets the president of the Pretty Boy Detective Club, a group of dreamily beautiful young men with unique talents who agree to take up the case to help find her missing star. All of them get swept up in something much larger than an astronomy conundrum, and Mayumi comes to accept several things about herself that she had mostly spurned until that point. 
Illustrated by Takeshi Obata
Mirai is unsatisfied with his life, as he is treated like a slave in his home and feels like he has no escape. He decides suicide is his only option. Upon leaping to his death, he is saved by an angel that gives him the choice to accept powers. In doing so, he is unwittingly thrust into a battle against 12 other humans who have also been chosen, and the prize at the end is ascension to become God of the world. For the most part, Mirai tries to keep out of the way of these other candidates, but trouble comes to find him sooner than he would like. 
At a young age, Allen Walker was constricted into the fight against the Millennium Earl and his deadly cruel Akuma, machines built upon the grief and sin of humans longing for the souls of a dearly departed loved one. With a powerful weapon embedded into his left hand and a cursed eye that can see Akuma trapped inside their human hosts, Allen is on a mission to find Innocence, a material that can be manufactured into new weapons to take on the Earl. This will help build up the power of the Black Order, the group of exorcists sworn to protect humanity and fight the Millennium Earl's Akuma weapons.
Illustrations by Yon
A young boy travels the land and tries to head off horrors that are preying on people. As he finds them, he collects them into a special book designed to contain them. These horrors set curses on people, make them act in strange ways, and even endanger their lives at times. The young boy follows clues and online chatter to discover new urban legends and ghost stories to sift out these curses and ghosts as they find new victims. 
Illustrated by Kazuma Kondou
On the worst day of Ganta’s life, a mysterious figure shrouded entirely in red cloth and diabolical power breaks into his junior high classroom and murders everyone but Ganta. As the sole survivor, Ganta is convicted and given a death sentence and sent to a prison called Deadman Wonderland where the prisoners perform in games and different shows for the entertainment of the population. But, even the prison isn’t straightforward as there are people inside trying to take advantage of Ganta, and there’s a weird girl with other-worldly powers who wants to be his friend. 
Kirie is a simple young girl from the town of Kurouzu-cho, a town that is slowly descending more and more into maddening problems all to do with spirals. Along with her brooding boyfriend Shuichi, Kirie narrowly escapes many horrific encounters with creatures and monsters inspired by spiral shapes. Kirie’s father, a local pottery artisan, even becomes infected as he dredges the pond by their house, Dragonfly Pond, for material, but it seems to be a magnet and a source for many spiral-shaped disasters.
School Library Journal review - part of Spring 2025 Fiction Made Simple, "8 Manga Fiction Series with Emotion, Drama, and All the Feels"
Sara's Rating: 7/10 Suitability Level: Grades 7-12 Reviews of previous volumes in this series: vol 1*, vol 2 Publisher: Kodansha Publication Date: October 22, 2024 ISBNs: 9781647293642 (Paperback) Tags: Rating: 7/10, Suitability: Middle School, Suitability: High School, Manga, Science Fiction, Survival, Action Adventure, Kodansha |
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