Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Nightschool

Overall Rating: B+
Summary: A urban fantasy/supernatural shōjo comedy series by Svetlana Chmakova, which follows two sisters, Alex and Sarah Treveney, who are witches. The manga itself (which is an OEL or Original English Language) centers around the Nightschool, an ordinary high school during the day, but teaches magic-based classes at night. At the beginning of the manga, Sarah has recently become a teacher at the Nightschool, and Alex is being homeschooled by her astral, a mysterious creature that is always with her. Why she is homeschooled has not been revealed yet, but it may be a part of a mysterious prophecy...

In the first volume, Alex sneaks off to practice her magic in a cemetery despite Sarah warning her not to. Unfortunately, this turns out to be a bad idea as she accidentally runs into some vampires and hunters. She manages to escape, but the hunters seem interested in her, which is almost probably not a good thing.

Speaking of the hunters, they are the other group that gets a lot of focus in the first volume. They protect humans from the "Night things", but unlike most hunters in this kind of story they don't wantonly kill the vampires, witches, and werewolves. Instead they focus on dangers to humans, and then make sure they are no longer a threat.


I had read a couple of chapters of this when it showed up in the Yen Plus manga magazine (which is where I originally read Soul Eater as well), and was interested in the plot. I ended up checking out the first volume when it was released and I was glad to see my interest held. I really enjoyed seeing the side of both the hunters and the vampires, witches and werewolves. It added a lot of depth to the supernatural aspects of the manga. On top of that, the character development was really solid, and I'm interested to see where things go from here. All-in-all a solid story and I look forward to reading volume 2.

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