Our team is made up of book lovers who are dedicated to sourcing and providing the best books for kids. For example, the artwork is a lot rougher and feels more rushed in the earlier stories in the collection. I find that Ito often has a problem with over-explaining some of his stories, but notable in these early works is how he just lets their premises stand for themselves.

I’ve mentioned before that I’ve become a little lukewarm on Ito’s work as a whole, while still loving some of his major works. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. This collection of 12 short stories features some of the author’s earliest works, including a tale of people with appetites for bizarre and unsettling food, another about an army deserter from World War Two who is kept in hiding by a vindictive family for eight years after the end of the war, and a story about a man who refuses to sleep, lest he allow his dreamworld counterpart to take over his body in the real world.

Oshima hates Furukawa because they had deserted the military together; Furukawa escaped, while Oshima was caught and punished. I still enjoyed it just fine, but his line work was a lot more rough around the edges and his penchant for smaller details was absent in some cases. There’s a similar streak of dark humour in ‘Bullied’, in which a woman reconnects with a man she used to torment when they were kids.

Grace lives alone in Ballybrady, a little village on the sublimely beautiful east coast of Northern Ireland. After Oshima leaves from his latest "raid", Kikuyo confronts her siblings, wanting to know why they shut Furukawa in the house and pretend it is still wartime. We work closely with publishers and authors to ensure that we offer the best books on the market for your child. A Father’s Love’ works well because it’s one of the longer stories, and takes plenty of time to flesh out its tale of a tyrannical patriarch who has a unique hold on his children.They find a note written by Furukawa two days after Kimie's death; he had committed suicide because he could not live with the knowledge he was responsible for her demise. Junji Ito is (as always) the king of body horror graphic novels that are both terrifying, fascinating and completely ridiculous and this book is no exception. There were three stories that stood out to me - I wouldn’t say I liked them completely but they were more than just “whacky horror cliche blood arrgh” which makes up the others. I was really happy to indulge in some old school Junji body horror as the last couple of releases have been a bit lack lustre. At Books2Door, we believe that reading is a fundamental skill that every child should have to help improve their vocabulary, grammar, and critical thinking skills.

I wish I'd written down ratings for each piece of the collection individually as I was reading through it, but this was one of those times where I was more in the mood to just zone out with the manga rather than take notes, and it wasn't good enough to want to re-read it for more thorough reviewing purposes (sorry! The Reanimator’s Sword” is about death and immortality, and what it takes to bring someone back from the dead.

When Grace saves his life in a kayaking accident - if it was an accident - and Evan's troubled son arrives to stay, all three are drawn together in a way that forces a reckoning with their personal traumas and draws them back into society. The title story “Deserter” and “The Long Hair in the Attic” had unexplainable manifestations of evil that made me want just a few more answers. Some current favorites include: Chucky on NBC, God of War for PC, and yet another playthrough the of Kingdom Hearts franchise. It’s a pattern I’ve noticed with Ito’s books: his stories start well but always descend into hysterical horror cliches that rarely make sense and often give the stories an unintentional comedic aspect. If you have trouble with bad things happening to young kids, skip A Father's Love and, moreso, Bullied.