Translated by Stephen Kohler
190 pages
Published 2018 (English translation published 2019)
Read July 3
Rating: 4 out of 5
It’s hard to do anything but doomscroll these days. SCOTUS is handing imperial powers over to the executive branch, all while the voters, somehow, have forgotten just how miserable the Trump years were. Similar trajectories of fascism are on the rise everywhere around the globe. I want to escape reality, yet it seems impossible to read these silly little books.
I hate this fucking timeline.
Anyway. Witch Hat Atelier! Yay!
Clearly, I’m not in the right headspace. Neither to appreciate a book nor to write a coherent review of it (not that I write many of those around here). Still, this book has penguin gryphons! Serpent paths! Rising stakes! A magical test! A real sense of danger! It’s all really good, coming together in a satisfying installment.
Shirahama’s artwork remains superb; she has more room to experiment here than she did in Volume 3, with chilling flashbacks to magic’s evil days, and action sequences that ripple and flow beautifully. And, because relevance to real-world problems has always been the secret ingredient to fantasy, I had a good cry after Qifrey mused, “Mankind is truly terrifying. As is the fact that so few of us acknowledge how easily terrifying things may come to pass.”
Damn it, I thought this was escapism.
Fuck the fascists. I know that none of this has anything to do with the book in hand, but fuck the fascists. Authoritarian control is the repudiation of humanity, of life and joy and change and meaning. I’m on the side of life, as long as I have it.
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