This is a manga I picked up from a Friends of the Plymouth (Minnesota) Library book sale. I get a lot of good stuff there.
Imagine a world where delivering mail is a perilous journey. Each delivery requires traveling a dark and monster-infested wilderness, alone and on foot. Your only defense is a special handgun that fires metaphorical bits of your own heart, and using it may attract more monsters, who seek the "heart" in your deliveries. That is what it is like to be a letter bee.
Letter Bees are the mailmen of this world of Amberground, a land of perpetual night. Their deliveries are the only thing connecting the various monster-safe zones to each other. Gauche is an elite Letter Bee, and the story begins with him delivering an unusual package, a human boy who has lost his mother.
This is the story of Letter Bee Gauche delivering Letter Lag Seeing to his destination and inspiring him to become a letter bee in his own right.
It's a great narrative and the character development in this volume alone is good, too. I liked the budding partnership between Lag and Niche as well as the world building of Amberground.
The art looks good. One gets a feel for the bleakness of the environment, and the emotion of the characters. These important things when "heart" is a central concept, and the art conveys that well.
Only one complaint, the action scenes. It is sometimes difficult to follow them, and thus make sense of what's happening. For me, this is at its worst when the "heart" gun is being loaded and fired.
Trickster Eric Novels gives Tegami Bachi volume 1 a B+
Click here for my next book review: The World's Strongest Rearguard - manga volume 4
Click here for my previous book review: Sleepy Princess in the Demon Castle volume 5 (Read for fun)
Brian Wilkerson is an independent novelist, freelance book reviewer, and writing advice blogger. He studied at the University of Minnesota and came away with bachelor's degrees in English Literature and History (Classical Mediterranean Period concentration).
His fantasy series, Journey to Chaos, is currently available on Amazon as an ebook or paperback.
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