Heaven’s Will

This is a light shoujo one-shot.  I like vaguely supernatural stories like this (though this series labels itself “goth”), so I was pretty excited about giving it a try.

I didn’t actually like it that much, but it wasn’t really the book’s fault.  I disliked it mostly because it seemed like the premise was almost wasted on a one-shot story like this, and it would have done better as a longer series.  Some of the details were left out, and others were shoved in, and I just feel bad that there won’t be more… or if there is, that too much was crammed in here.

Basically, we meet a main character who has a Watanuki-like problem of being constantly picked on by demons that nobody else can see.  Seeking refuge in a haunted house, she runs across a girl who can exorcise said demons.  The girl is actually a guy who cross-dresses though, a problem because the main character is also sort of afraid of men.  The cross-dressing boy also has a pet vampire who can turn into a wolf, and it turns out he cross-dresses and plans on getting a sex change so that he can give another his body.  So he’s going to exorcise demons for a price, and the main character will help him since she can see the demons and acts as sort of a magnet for them.

See?  Great premise.  I read lots of trashy novels along the same lines and love them.  But as I said, having all those good ideas crammed into 200 pages just doesn’t work, especially since there’s also a developing romance almost mixed in.  It’s not exactly rushed or anything… I just think it could have been expanded.

What is there are two different cases that the characters help each other out on.  The first shows the main character that often the things she is afraid of aren’t actually that scary.  The second is a case that deals with a haunted paino that mostly serves to show the past of the male character.  All the stuff in the volume’s pretty good, though the story stays pretty shallow because of its length.

It’s a good book for preteens, I think, and there’s nothing that I can recall that’s particularly disturbing or wrong about it.  It’s exactly the type of story I like, too, but like I said… I prefer my stories a bit longer.

This was a review copy provided by Viz.