If you’re a teen (6th through 12th grade) and you love Japanese manga, anime, and pop culture, join us monthly to watch anime, discuss manga, create our own manga, eat Japanese snacks, and let us know what to buy next.

The first meeting is Tuesday October 9th from 3:00-4:30pm in Hunneman Hall at the Main Library.  Sign up online here or come into the library to sign up in person.

Everything you ever wanted to know about the club is here:
http://www.brooklinelibrary.org/teens/mangaanime

Do your parents ever wonder just why you’re reading or watching manga and anime?  Let them know—there will be a Parents Information Session on Thursday October 4th (that’s next Thursday!) from 6:30-7:30pm in the teen room.  Teen Librarian, club moderator and manga expert, Robin Brenner will be there to answer everyone’s questions.

Shy Aki is struggling with her perfect older brother’s death.  Her parents offer little aid in recovery, and she constantly feels the pressure of comparisons to her dead sibling, both externally and internally imposed.  As a victim of escalating bullying, she retreats further and further into silence and shadows.  Her longing for her brother’s protection is threaded through every scene as she sinks farther and farther away from reality.  Then suddenly up pops Kai: a confident, brash girl who swaggers through Aki’s life, dealing out justice to her tormentors.  The problem is: where did Kai come from?  As Aki experiences longer and longer periods of blackout, it becomes all too clear that her savior may be very close indeed.  Is it her brother’s spirit come back to defend her?  Or is she simply losing her mind?  Does it matter, if in some small way she can get her brother back?

Sho Murase fills her pages with swirls of gray tones, blacks, and lines with remarkable style, and depends a lot on her superlative sense of design to carry the emotional weight of the story.  The dialog and text retreads a familiar tale of dual personalities, but the art elevates it into a moody examination of isolation and the need for a hero.  ME 2, a psychological mystery, will appeal to teens who want something a little less frothy than the usual manga romance.  The mystery is not so much who Kai is but more how her presence will affect Aki’s place the in world and her recovery from grief.

Originally written for No Flying, No Tights, a graphic novel review website