Manga Review: Spy X Family
One thing I have figured out about myself recently is that I like my novels digital and my comics physical. I’ve had Spy x Family’s first volume on Kindle for more than a year, and I remember reading the first chapter and enjoying it, and then not going back to it for some reason. I got a gift card for Christmas and seeing that the series was up to 6 volumes in the US, I decided to give it a second shot.
I devoured four volumes in a day, and I have two more on the way. I curse the publishing schedule that will make we wait until April for the Volume 7 to come out.
Spy x Family is about a pseudo–Cold War environment between analogs of East and West Germany. A tense peace exists between the two sides, and all that keeps the peace is the dirty work of spies like Twilight. For his next assignment, he needs a child to infiltrate an elite school, and a wife to keep up appearances. This leads him to Anya, the pint-sized psychic, and Yor, an office worker who is secretly a hitman (hitperson?). Anya knows who her fake parents are, but she’s the sort of goofy kid that she thinks it’s all awesome. Yor and Twilight, though, are completely in the dark about any of this.
In Spy x Family, everybody has a secret. This could be the basis for a tense, dark series, but Anya’s goofiness and telepathy throws a wrench in all of that. There’s a lot of joy in watching a small child misunderstanding what she reads in people’s heads and struggling her way through problems. If I have a critique, I want to see more of Yor’s assassin life, but everything that is there is well executed.
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