Another awesome volume of Yotsuba! I especially loved Yotsuba at the festival in her happi, helping pull the dashi to the shrine. Also, having seen people play taiko drums live, I can tell you it takes a lot of work to play one. They do a lot of training! I hope there are more Yotsuba & Yanda chapters, their rivalry is pretty adorable. ( )

Do you ever read something that fills you with such a burning passion to live? That's what I feel like whenever I get to reading the misadventures of Yotsuba. This series is sort of like a salve to the cynicism of modern media, and I wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone in need of a smile. ( )

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Title: Yotsuba&! Vol. 8
Series: Yotsuba&! #8
Author: Kiyohiko Azuma
Rating: 5 of 5 Stars
Genre: Manga
Pages: 208
Words: 8K

Synopsis:

Chapter List:

Yotsuba & Opposites

Yotsuba & the Restaurant

Yotsuba & the Cultural Festival

Yotsuba & the Typhoon

Yotsuba & Watching the House

Yotsuba & the Festival

Yotsuba & Acorns

My Thoughts:

I read this sunday. I was feeling tired, stressed out and sick (probably from stressing out) and reading this was like taking a huge horse tranquilizer. By the end of the volume I was totally chill. I had been debating about whether I wanted to read this feeling the way I was but am I glad I did.

The picture I included this time was from the Festival Chapter. Yotsuba is helping pull a shrine and they take a break so she and her dad and some others are looking at the other portable shrines when Yotsuba sees the sumo wrestler. I remember laughing my head off the first time I saw this page and man, it hasn't stopped being funny to me. The manga-ka has totally caught that innocent yet bold spirit of being a 5 year old.

★★★★★ ( )

I've enjoyed this series enough to want to keep on reading it. I've run out of books in this series now so I'll either have to wait for my older son to buy the next five books or wait to get them from my public library. I have them on hold right now.

What I liked the most in this volume were the drawings of the typhoon. Those were simply awesome rain drawings. One of the drawings in which Yotsuba and her dad rid themselves of umbrellas reminded me of being a kid myself and running around outside in the middle of a thunderstorm just to splash through rushing puddles. I'm not sure kids are even allowed to do such things any more, at least where I live.

I also enjoyed the festival in which Yotsuba helped pull an omikoshi (portable shrine), viewed a tengu ("a long-nosed goblin thought to be dangerous but can also have protective qualities"). In this case, the tengu was just a dressed-up Jumbo. That reminds me of a time when I was a kid, and my mom used to tell me that Santa Claus and Peter Rabbit were dressed up daddies, but I didn't believe her. It was bizarre in this book to view a man's naked butt sticking out of a fundoshi (traditional Japanese loincloth/underwear") at a festival. However, I thought this festival was an especially nice part of Japanese culture to be part of this volume. ( )

Funny and heartwarming to read ( )