Tenshi Ja Nai by Takako Shigematsu (amazon)
In elementary school, Hikaru had a brief stint as a child model and as a result was bullied by her classmates. Now that she’s in high school, she wants nothing more than a ordinary life. When her parents move to France, she stays in Japan and enrolls in [...]

If you’ve got some manga you don’t want anymore, you can always give it away, but you might want to try swapping it too. One list that I’ve used for a long time to swap manga is manga trade, but there are a couple new sites I’ve used recently that have also come in handy [...]

I’m coming up on my 5th (!) year of blogging, so I’m going to give away some manga to a lucky reader. In the past I’ve offered up chances to win individual volumes of manga, but I don’t have the time to do that now. So this year, I’m giving away a sample pack of [...]

Kaput and Zosky by Lewis Trondheim (amazon)
Kaput and Zosky is a thoroughly delightful comic book for young people about inept space invaders. Kaput and Zosky travel from planet to planet looking for a world to rule but they never seem to manage to pull it off. They land on a planet where the [...]

Viz has a bunch of manga coming out soon, here’s what I think looks most interesting from the press release:
CAT EYED BOY • Rated “T+” for Older Teens • MSRP: $24.99 •Available June
17, 2008
Cat Eyed Boy is a half-human, half-monster child whose mostly human
appearance bans him from the demon world. He lives hidden in the [...]

Crossroad Volume 3 (amazon)
This was a good reminder of why it is sometimes best to follow the “2 volume rule” when evaluating a manga series. I liked the first volume of Crossroad well enough, but I thought that the second volume was much funnier, and the third volume sets up some interesting complications in [...]

Dokebi Bride Volumes 1-4 by Marley (amazon)
Sunbi Shin’s mother is dead and she lives with her grandmother in a small village. Her grandmother is the village shaman, able to see spirits and demons called dokebis. Sunbi has inherited some of her grandmother’s powers, but her grandmother doesn’t want her to become a shaman. When [...]

Books
Rouge Male by Geoffrey Household - I did not realize that a book about a man hiding in a hole in the ground would be so suspenseful.
Seduction of the Crimson Rose by Lauren Willig - There was not as much swashbuckling in this book as I was used to from the previous volumes in this [...]