A solid continuation.
Creative Staff
Story/Art: Ai Morinaga
Translation/Adaptation: Alethea and Athena Nibley
What They Say
Hana Suzuki has it good: she’s the only girl in the Grand Hockey Club, and all the other members are super-hot guys. But the dream may be over. If the Hockey Club doesn’t win its next match, the school will disband it! Hana and the boys are pretty much the worst hockey players ever. Can they get their act together in time to save the club?
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
Hana continues to be one of those characters that, luckily for us, excel at certain antisocial characteristics. Thankfully for us, she shows no signs of character development. She’s incredibly lazy, doesn’t care about good-looking guys, and prefers food to friends, and I love it. I love the fact that she ignores Izumi’s advances and never hesitates to put him in his place. Along those lines, Izumi is a rich punk-assed jerk and his true nature really shines through when the team travels to Yamagata for a match.
Their opponents are a poor group of students at a small town school and as such, all of their equipment is barely functional. The nets are held together by string and their hockey sticks are almost completely covered with duct tape. Despite the opposing teams pure love of hockey, Izumi doesn’t even want to play them because they’re so poor. He is so disgusted that he continually denigrates the ‘poor people’, which only reminds Hana how much she dislikes Izumi. Even when Izumi does something incredibly nice like buy the opposing team all new equipment, it’s not out of kindness. He just doesn’t want to take the chance of ‘accidentally’ getting hurt by the poor kids shoddy equipment.
In Summary
This volume has plenty of funny jokes, but I felt it wasn’t quite as funny as the first. I’m also disappointed with the continued lack of hockey. I understand the joke factor of always having something interrupt the hockey matches, but I’m growing a little bored with it. I would like to see them play an entire game, win or lose. However, I enjoy all the discussion of food the characters have in this book. Much to Hana’s enjoyment, the hockey club spends most of their time eating. Since the club travels a lot, they are always eating different local dishes and luckily, the translators spend a lot of time explaining the food.
Content Grade: B
Art Grade: B+
Packaging Grade: A
Text/Translation Grade: A-
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Del Rey Manga
Release Date: August 28th, 2007
MSRP: $10.95
