With Pete’s kidnapping at the end of volume 2 hanging over everyone’s heads, volume 3 opens with our cast scrambling with preparations for half of the gang to descend into the labyrinth beneath the school to rescue him. Of course the ones descending are Oliver and Michela, our two characters most experienced with the darkness in the world of magic (and who have appointed themselves unofficial Team Moms, especially when Oliver calls everyone together for an emergency sex ed meeting in volume 4, despite everyone’s protestations), and Nanao, a complete newbie to the world of magic but an absolute powerhouse when it comes to both swords and sorcery. These three are the most likely to survive this early expedition into the Labyrinth and as the gang finishes their first year at Kimberly Magic Academy, they all hope that everyone will be there to see their second.
“Harry Potter style magic and world building but the morals of Fate/” continues to be a very apt description for this series and the combination of these two tones is still continuing to work, mostly. When it comes to Pete’s rescue and the readers seeing more of what some magical families put their own children through in pursuit of some greater magic, i.e. when the story remains insular and focuses just on Kimberly, it works and generates a real sense of tension. Although, at the same time I do wonder if Kimberly has an abnormally high mortality rate amongst magical schools or if all magical schools accept that a decent percentage of their students will die before they graduate (rather like Naomi Novik’s A Deadly Education) and the rare time the cast ventures into a town outside of Kimberly it’s impossible not to wonder. It certainly seems like Kimberly is scorned for being exceptionally dangerous and, realizing that all of the characters must have known this before entering the school, left me feeling conflicted about some of the characterization.
Take Katie for example: she was born into a magical family and is determined to be like her parents and fight for the rights of non-humans, which is a very unpopular stance at Kimberly (to the point of outright harassment). When asked by her friends why she didn’t go to another school more inline with her beliefs her answer is, well, it’d be too easy to be complacent around people like me, I needed to see “the real world” instead, and that bit stood out to me as a particularly clumsy moment where you can feel the hand of the author making events happen. After four volumes I could certainly buy into the times when we see that Katie is more willing to pursue more unethical methods in her goal for equal rights, but this is an idea that she’s come to terms with because of her time at Kimberly, which seems at odds with her pre-story self deciding to go into the belly of the beast as it were. Bokuto Uno seems to really enjoy making the characters as twistedly gray as possible, with nearly every character seeming to simultaneously have a good and bad reason for all their actions, but even then each character has their limits.
Perhaps the character where this is the most obvious is Oliver himself, after the flash forward at the beginning of volume 1, where it seems like he’s basically succeeded in taking down every person involved in the murder of his mother, and the brief duel in his first year, his quest for revenge rarely comes up and I’m really wondering how Uno will marry together these two sides of him. When asked by one of his subordinates, Oliver more or less says that no, the face he puts on for his friends is also part of his authentic self; having a group is a strategic necessity at Kimberly but he really is ride-or-die for them. Frankly if this dual-sided nature is really going to work these books are going to need more murder in them. Of course this could turn out to be a long series — if Uno spends two or three volumes per school year and at least some of the cast remains through their sixth year we could be looking at a 18 volume series or more and pacing an 18 volume series is different from pacing say an eight volume story. But as it stands, I’m still waiting for Uno to resolve and smooth out the back and forth in this series between light-hearted and heavy-handed. There’s definitely a happy middle between the two of them (one that series does reach at times!) but the story isn’t quite there yet.
