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Title: Please Save My Earth
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| CONSUMER ADVICE |
Parents will want to keep this series away from kids, as themes of death, betrayal, homosexuality, and lonliness dominate this series, and quite a few sequences are quite intense even for adults. |
If ever there was a series that defined the word "interesting" it would be "Please Save My Earth." "Please Save My Earth" is a shoujo from the mid-eighties, but starting out like that doesn't give this series the respect it deserves. "Please Save My Earth" is a story that is hard to describe. Not because it is confusing, but just because it's so complicated and deep, that if you only scratch the surface you are being unfair, and if you give the basics for everything going on, you just make it sound more confusing then it really is. *sigh* What's a humble comic book critic to do? Oh well, time to crank up the volume on the CD player (which is currently playing Michael Card) and just do the best I can. "Please Save My Earth" revolves around a ton of characters, both male and female. But the story focuses the most on two core characters that cause the most chain reactions: Alice Sakaguchi and Rin Kobayashi.
Alice is a sixteen-year-old high school student who has no friends on account that she's very shy, and Rin is the seven-year-old brat who seems to have a crush on her. Normally these two would have nothing to do with each other, but they actually have one connection to each other: They were both friends in a previous lifetime. Heh, how many of you are doing a double take at your computer right now? Well, if you think THAT'S weird, wait until you get into the story some more! There's love triangles (realistic one's that require the characters to be smart mind you), dreams of visions, secrets, lies, adultry, betrayal, mystery, and even a couple of really cool battle sequences featuring psychic powers. The story continues when Alice finds a couple of teenage boys at her school expressing how much they love each other. When the boys notice that they aren't alone, they explain to Alice that they were actually acting out a dream they've been having. The way things are going, both boys are having the same dream at night, but they are both playing different characters in their dream. One guys watching the dream from the point-of-view of a male scientist, and the other is viewing the dream as the scientists female lover. These dreams have been going on for months now. A few days later, Alice has a dream where she's someone named Mokuren, and the boys realize that she is also playing a character in their dream world. This sets off a chain of events where the characters realize that they might have past lives, finding out what happened in their poast lives, and finding out what it means.
Some characters do what they can to find out all they can in their past life, some don't care, some are against the idea, but there is one thing that is certain: Past events are repeating themselves in the current life, and the only way to understand their current lives may be to understand their previous lives. This is where the story starts splitting up, but not breaking up. There's so much stuff going on, that you will be amazed at not only how much stuff happens at various times in the series, but how it all works well together too. You'd think that once the story started talking about two different lives, following at least fifteen major characters, a few side characters that get caught up in the main conflict, and asking such questions as "how do these dreams affect us now," that the story would fall appart. This is not the case. In fact, you start to respect the series much more because it does so much, and yet it NEVER breaks up for feels like a broken narative! It just always works, and part of the reason is definetly the authors understanding of when too much is too much, andwhen too little is too little. Did I mention the story is gripping? Seriously, this is one of the few series you will read that will have you gripping onto the book so hard in anticipation, that there very well will be fingermarks on the outside of the book by the time you are finished with it.
This is one of the few series where you get two stories for the price of one.
This book is also everything to everyone. It's the fantasy series for people who normally don't read fantasy, it's the romance series for people who hate "Sleepless In Seatle," and it's the action series that is smarter then "XXX" and "The Fast and The Furious." The one thing that may bring this series down from being perfect (DAMN IT) is the artwork. Now let's get something straight here: I don't hate the artwork. In fact, the artwork is pretty darn beautiful most of the time. With that said though, the artwork looks a little dated. While not bad, it looks like it came from a certain period in time, and that will put some people off at first (it did for me). Everything else though is fine. This is a series that is so good, so powerful, so effective, that no mere review can describe it properly. Some of the most memorable characters, finest writing, and complicated themes are contained in this series, but if I were to get into the basics, we'd be here for a couple of hours. In fact, this series is so good, that I'm going to overlook the fact that the artwork is a little dated, and give this book my highest recommdation. "Please Save My Earth" is one of the greatest works of visual literature I've ever read. And you can quote me on that.
- -Review By Kevin T. Rodriguez- -