Hello everyone!
As you might have noticed, it has been a little while since I last posted a volume review here. I know I promised I’d do one every two weeks, and I’m hoping to once again commit to doing so, but it hasn’t been very successful lately. I can only apologize. Truth is, I did read this 12th volume a little while ago and I was fully planning to do a review shortly after, but it just didn’t end up working out. But better late than never, I suppose. Let’s get to it!
This volume mainly sees more misadventures at the academy and starts off as such. Chise and her new classmates are all still outside recovering from finding out that Zoe has snakes for hair. To be fair, that would come as quite a shock to me as well, but then again I don’t live in a fantastical world filled with magical creatures. At least as far as I know. The only thing out of place are the voices in my head. Now as I’ve said, this volume focuses a lot on the interpersonal relationships between the different families of alchemists at the academy. Philomela’s family works for Veronica’s family and Lucy’s family seems to be down to just Lucy.
What I find more interesting is the relationship growth between Alice and Renfred, Alice and Chise, and Chise and Elias. Alice spends the night at their place and Chise and Elias talk on the roof in the middle of the night. Their relationship is improving steadily after being off to a very rocky start. But enough about that, it’s road trip time! This won’t go wrong, I bet.
The big part of camp seems to go by fairly uneventfully. Elias and Ruth are there to protect Chise if things go wrong. Chise does have a run in with a strange fae but doesn’t really try to interact with it.
Then during the final night Lucy disappears, because of course she does. There wouldn’t be a point to this mini arc if nothing happened during it. Luckily, Chise finds Lucy rather quickly, but the poor girl seems to be completely drained of magic. Chise should be the perfect candidate to nurse her back to health, but right as she’s about to head back to camp we are treated to one of the most haunting panels in the entire manga so far. What looks to be a giant one-eyed centaur fae casually walks into frame as chills run down Chise’s spine. This moment kind of surprised me, I figured something more related to Lucy being unable to wake up quickly was going to happen, but instead of that, things escalated a lot faster.
I wasn’t too excited by most of this volume. It felt like it was tying up loose threads and setting up new ones, but it felt like a mish-mash of stories. Hopefully we get a more linear plotline in the next volume. There’s only 2 volumes left on my shelf, hopefully three by the time I finish the other two, but by the time we get to volume 15, I’m going to have to think of a different series to look at. I’m still not sure yet. I’m currently reading The Anthropocene Reviewed by the wonderful John Green, but that’s not really the kind of book I would review. So far I would give it five stars, and he’d appreciate me using a 5-star rating scale to review his book that is all about reviews. But enough about that. If you’re still reading along, what do you think of the direction the manga is taking at this point in time? Let me know in the comments down below and I will hopefully see you here again in two weeks! Thanks for reading.
Opal Kaharis 