What we’re reading this week

The hottest book in my house these days is Yotsuba&!, by Kiyohoko Azuma, the creator of Azumanga Daioh. My kids absolutely love this book and still be heard laughing out loud at it, even on the third and fourth reading. I found the humor in Azumanga Daioh hovering somewhere between incomprehensible and nonexistent, but this book is a lot better, partly because Azuma dumps the four-panel format, partly because it’s just written and drawn better. The book is published by ADV but I can’t find a mention of it on their website.
The book opens with Yotsuba, a six-year-old girl, and her father arriving in a new town. We get no backstory, but Yotsuba is curiously unfamiliar with many of the elements of everyday life, and the humor is driven by her first-time encounters with such ordinary objects as swings, doorbells, and air conditioners. There is a good cast of sympathetic characters, and the artwork is clean and easy to follow.
Also being passed around my house at the moment are Tokyo Mew Mew A La Mode, which I have a lot of trouble warming up to; Gals!, and two Seven Seas titles, Amazing Agent Luna and Last Hope. Oh, and we finally got a copy of Shojo Beat. I’ll be reading all these and posting reviews to the main site soon, I hope.