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Choose Your Own Adventure Retrospective: The Curse of Batterslea Hall by Richard Brightfield

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The Curse of Batterslea Hall  was always my favourite CYOA book – it was also, for reasons I'll get into, one of the more unusual ones. It sparked my later love of adventure games and inspired some of my sketchy early attempts at creative writing (including a thinly veiled recreation on 90s 'edutainment' program Storybook Weaver ). It also deepened my devastation when I returned home one fateful school night to discover my mum had donated my extensive CYOA collection – precious gems tremblingly unearthed from the dusty Mills and Boon-straining shelves of my local Scope – back to charity. Around twenty years later, and I took the obvious next step for a mildly lockdown-crazed 90s kid squinting down the barrel of their thirties: sourced a copy inflated by just four times the original cover price through eBay. But was it worth it, and does it still hold up? Dust off your bootcut jeans and fire up your Walkman – it's adventurin' time, 90s* style... The premise Battersl...
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First Impressions of Princess Jellyfish by Akiko Higashimura (Vol. 1): Funny, Feel-Good and Fabulous

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What's it about? 'Tsukimi Kurashita has a strange fascination with jellyfish. She’s loved them from a young age and has carried that love with her to her new life in the big city of Tokyo. There, she resides in Amamizukan, a safe haven for girl geeks who regularly gush over a range of things from trains to Japanese dolls. However, a chance meeting at a pet shop has Tsukimi crossing paths with one of the things that the residents of Amamizukan have been desperately trying to avoid – a beautiful and fashionable woman! But there’s much more to this woman than her trendy clothes! This odd encounter is only the beginning of a new and unexpected path for Tsukimi and her friends.' [Kindle edition blurb] Things I loved I'm a sucker for slice-of-life josei manga geared towards an older female audience – they're such unicorns! – so the premise of this and its quirkily charming art style immediately appealed to me.  I was also impressed by its focus on an often overlooked grou...
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First Impressions of Mars by Fuyumi Soryo: A Beloved 90s Shōjo Classic

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⚠️  This review contains spoilers for Volumes 1 to 5 . How it started Fuyumi Soryo's manga career had an unlikely start – as an artsy fashion college student, she earned an honorable mention in a manga competition after entering to raise money for a fashion contest.  Mars , which would become her most popular work, was first serialised in shōjo magazine Bessatsu Friend  from 1995 to 2000 before being published as 15 manga volumes from 1996 to 2000. Despite the shōjo genre's bubblegum trappings, Soryo became known for exploring darker, more psychological themes in her work.  While Mars fell out of print several years ago, it has enjoyed a recent resurgence ; it was adapted into a live-action series and film in Japan in 2016, and ComiXology and Kodansha Comics brought the series back into digital circulation in 2019. You can read it now via a Prime Reading or Kindle Unlimited subscription or buy it on Kindle (Amazon actually did good in this case). What's i...
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The Joys of Josei

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Manga and anime character tropes are a lot like gravity in that they can be said to follow a kind of unwritten law ; the silver-haired pretty-boy, the bespectacled brain, the plucky but naive hero. These archetypes stay in circulation because, for the most part, they work. But for fans drawn to the medium for its idiosyncrasy, these cookie cutter characters, though comforting, can get kinda tedious. Sadly, I know people who have given up on manga and anime altogether out of sheer exhaustion at these recurring clichés -- and Japanese anime fans are getting just as fed up as everyone else.
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