Ziska is a veterinarian apprentice, and while she’s perfectly happy to treat everyday animals using conventional means, Ziska grew up in a magic-using family and she knows that there are still magical beasts lurking out there in the wild. She’s eager to learn how to use her own magical powers to treat all these beasts, ordinary and magical alike, but magic doesn’t always go as planned and her teacher is sometimes hesitant to let her perform well-intentioned experiments on their patients.
This title seems to have flown a bit under the radar – the second volume is already out in the US and I’ve barely heard any chatter about it, which is a shame since this is a rather charming story. This is one of the many low-fantasy series that Seven Seas has released lately, and on the surface it seems less fantastical and innovative than most. How to Treat Magical Beasts has a much more mundane setting and plot than some of the other titles released this year, such as Sorry For My Familiar‘s demon underworld or Juana and the Dragonewts’ Seven Kingdoms‘ post-apocalyptic monster society, but manga-ka Kaziya seems to have a stronger grasp on both storytelling and worldbuilding than these two.
How to Treat Magical Beasts’ setting feels like an idealized and idyllic European countryside early on in the Industrial Revolution that would shape the modern world. The combination of Ziska’s profession, and the town she lives near, reminds me a little bit of James Herriott’s memoirs of working as a vet in rural England circa 1930s and 40s.
I must not have been the only one — the tagline on the back of this volume, “All Creatures Great and Magical” is a clear reference to his first work, All Creatures Great and Small. This type of setting and story, where magic is present but it’s not the sole focus of the story is one I like and one that I feel gets overlooked a lot with the abundance of high fantasy stories out there.
Terms like “high fantasy” and “low fantasy” usually refer specifically to the setting of the story, but I think that these words can also be used more broadly to describe the kinds of plots that often populates these settings. Ziska lives in a world where magic and magical creatures are now so rare that many people don’t believe they exist at all and are easily taken in by obvious fakes when they pop up.
None of this seems to bother Ziska very much however. I’d be interested to learn more about her family in future volumes since they were clearly magic users as well and yet she doesn’t seem to be living near any of them. She seems to be learning everything on her own, and she also doesn’t seem particularly sad about magic fading away. Her teacher does seem to have magical experience as well but overall he’s a more minor character than you would expect given his top billing in the story’s title.
The art for How to Treat Magical Beasts is on the simple side, but while the character designs are a little underwhelming the magical creature designs have a lot of charm to them. There isn’t anything inherently bad about the art, and it’s not boringly workmanlike either, but there isn’t anything spectacular to set the art apart either. With so many manga coming out these days for English-speaking readers, both the story and the art really need to pop in order to catch a potential reader’s eye and I wonder if this simplier art is part of the reason why this book hasn’t received a lot of word-of-mouth buzz. Not every story will be a bestseller of course but this one seems like it could appeal to many fans of Seven Seas other series, like fans of The Ancient Magus’ Bride or The Girl From the Other Side.
Hopefully more people will find this story as more volumes come out and I would certainly like to read more. I’ve always liked animal-focused stories, and How To Treat Magical Beast‘s gentle tone really does remind me a lot of the James Herriot’s memoirs (which I’m also a fan of) so this manga is a great fit for my tastes.
Plus, this volume ends with a bit of an unexpected cliffhanger and I need to see what happens next!