+Anima, Volume 3

This third volume of +Anima continues the adventures of the characters introduced in the first volume: Cooro, the cheerfully impetuous crow-winged boy; Husky, the sulky hot-headed mer-boy who can't stand girls; Senri, the silent older youth whose right-arm is that of a bear; and Nana, the chatty bat-winged girl who main defense is her ultrasonic scream. We also see the return of Rose, the sexy older cat +anima girl who travels around as a peddler, and the kids' adversary the soldier Igneous who appears particularly hostile to Senri for some reason. There are four stories in this volume. In "Wings of the Wind", Cooro comes across a human youth, Shadow, who wants to build a flying machine and resents Cooro's +anima gift that allows him to fly on his own. In "Guardian Heart", the kids run into Igneous again, who is pressuring a retired weapons maker, now a blacksmith, to return to his craft to forge new swords for the army. They try to aid the blacksmith and discover a new +anima in the process. In "Husky's Melancholy" (my personal favorite), Nana suspects that Husky is actually a girl pretending to be a boy and tries to get him to accept his girl-ness with hilarious results. In the final story, "Scars", the kids encounter Rose again, and in the course of helping a village discover yet another +anima. All good stories, and we see more clues about each of the characters backgrounds (won't reveal them here, you'll have to read the book). If you liked the first two volumes, then you'll definitely like this one as well.