In saving a junior high student, a fellow first year and Sakura have provoked a neighboring gang, the Shishitoren, whose general and several members challenge a select group of Bofurin to a one-on-one style tournament to settle the score. The matches include Sakura and Bofurin’s general, Umemiya. At first meeting, Umemiya doesn’t seem like the type of person to be leading the school, and Sakura is not at all impressed by his bubbly nature and proclivity for vegetable gardening. Within the Shishitoren turf is their headquarters and the site of their fights. It's an abandoned theater with plenty of good views of the fights happening on the the stage for everyone to see all of the action.
I found it a little bothersome that both of the generals for Bofurin and Shishitoren have the same childlike attitude until it’s time to get serious. They’re a little too similar. But Nii-san could be doing this to make them easier as foils for one another, so we'll have to wait and see if there's something more that comes of their similarities later. Some of the bad guys in Shishitoren are underdeveloped and more like caricatures of the typical Japanese "delinquent" stereotype, so I wish there was more done to develop them and make them less two-dimensional. This volume had some good pacing and didn’t try to cram all the fights in at once. I appreciate that the two big fights will be broken into another volume other than this one.
Sara's Rating: 8/10 Suitability Level: Grades 9-12 Reviews of previous volumes in this series: vol 1 Publisher: Kodansha Publication Date: October 3, 2023 ISBN: 9781646518364 (Paperback) Tags: Rating: 8/10, Suitability: High School, Manga, Action Adventure, School Life, Kodansha
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