Monster Tamer Girls Volume 1 (Review, Spoilers)

Monster Tamer Girls: in a world subjected to new waves of kaiju, Ion Hidaka and Sora Misumaru are part of the freshest crop of monster tamers, a special girls’ school class comprised of those kids whose voices hit just the right notes to lull and charm monsters. While the titans of Monster Tamer Girls look like Poke-Kaiju, they are much more melancholic, with demeanors more like the alligators you can see sunning in Animal Kingdom.

Despite the inoffensive monsters, Ion is high-strung, and would prefer not to be a monster tamer–and is even told that she should find something else to do by former monster charmer virtuoso Saegusa–her talent for it proves innate, and the monsters take a shine to the cowardly newbie. As you might expect from any comic set in a school, or any bildungsroman of any make or model, much of this tale focuses on Ion thwarting her detractors and proving her ability. While we have seen this many times before, it was also what the reader ordered off the menu when he or she picked up Monster Tamer Girls. For it to succeed, it only has to be cute and/or satisfy the reader’s appetite for moral fiction. Though Ion has yet to thwart her detractors and conquer her own fears entirely, it is only volume one.

Not only is the moral of Monster Tamer Girls conventional for adult readers, but parents looking for manga for young readers will be pleased to know that Monster Tamer Girls is only as suggestive as your average fairy tale, which is to say barely at all to a child mind. Though it is set in a girls’ school, the author is not telling that kind of a tale, although adult readers are, as usual, permitted to view this tale through whatever kind of interpreting goggles they please. (Freudians may be more pleased than yuri fans, though, as there is more girl riding monster than girl hugging girl.)

Overall, I was pleased with Monster Tamer Girls, though I found that I was unable to read it in one sitting, as there was such little variation between the contents of each chapter. If studios look at this manga for adaptations, I recommend letting the kaiju and the girls see more of the world outside the school.

Monster Tamer Girls Volume 1 arrived in stores on April 10th, 2018, and you can also order it through this list of booksellers on the Yen Press site.

Yen Press sent the review copy.