YOTSUBA&!, Volume 1

Wow, very bizarre. This episodic manga is about a young girl - Yotsuba - moving to a new town with her Dad, and meeting the family of a mother and three daughters that lives next door. Somehow the endearingly obnoxious Yotsuba charms her neighbours more than she annoys, and miraculously has the same effect on this reader too. I'm not sure why this is so appealing - the stories are very episodic and really pretty slight with little true plot development over this volume. But the depiction of Yotsuba, with her confusion and capriciousness and curiosity is really entertaining and endearing.

I'm not giving it a rating as I wouldn't know whether to give it 2 stars for being so slight or 5 stars for being so well done.

Ella has been giggling at these for over a year now, so I thought I'd give them a try. I mean, she (and her younger sister) were right about the Bone books: I *do* like them. Turns out that she's right about these too: they're sweet, charming and entertaining.

Yotsuba is 5 years old and she has green hair; she locks herself in the bathroom, goes hunting for cicadas (it's a catch-and-release program, never fear), hangs out with the neighbour girls, learns about doorbells and air conditioners and escalators. The humour comes from the discrepancy between the way that Yotsuba sees the world and the way it actually is, but the overall appeal is rooted in the fact that the relationships are believable and the reader wants to spend time in the show more company of these characters. show less

A lot of people I've interacted with on different social sites and message boards have avatars from Yotsuba&! or else often referred to the series with praise. I didn't enjoy the anime version of the author's other well-known series, Azumanga Daioh, though, so I didn't really think much of Yotsuba&! But then I was at the public library waiting for a computer to open up so I could do some schoolwork and wandered into the graphic novels section. This first volume was lying on the end of the shelf, all alone, so I picked it up to page through. And was totally captured.

Yotsuba is an adorable, energetic little girl with green hair and four pigtails (her name means "four leaf", thus the clover theme) who is probably four or five years old. show more The title of the series comes from the way the chapters are named - "Yotsuba and ____". This first volume tells the story of the first few days of Yotsuba and her father's life in a new home, beginning with their arrival and moving in. Not only do we meet them, but we also meet Yotsuba's dad's friend Takashi Takeda, called "Jumbo" because he's practically a giant, and the new neighbors, the Ayase family: mother, elder sister Asagi, middle sister Fuka (age 15), and younger sister Ena (age 10 or so).

Probably the main theme of the book is that Yotsuba does everything with HIGH ENERGY and LOTS OF ENJOYMENT (though I'm not sure that she really enjoyed getting thrown from a swing after accidentally letting go, or being afraid of a/c turning the earth into a mud ball). It would be very apt to say that everything Yotsuba does is done in CAPS with LOTS of exclamation points. Just like an energetic, happy four-year-old, really.

There is absolutely nothing bad or sad in this story, except for references towards the end of Yotsuba being an orphan (her dad is a translator and found her when he was abroad and ended up bringing her home with him to take care of her), and maybe if you have a phobia of bugs, the chapter when Yotsuba accidentally releases a huge swarm of cicadas into the Ayase house might not be the best thing to read. (It's totally cute and funny, though, especially when Jumbo starts showing off towards the eldest, and very attractive, sister.)

Also, please don't be discouraged by the apparent plot points I listed in that last paragraph! This is a great example of "slice of life", where the plot is almost non-existent, and what details there are don't really matter so much as the view of everyday life. It's not very fast-paced, but Yotsuba's enthusiasm for everything and the comedy make that not matter at all. (I'm a fan of slice-of-life, though, so I could be biased.)

This was a really fun read, and I'm going to see if I can't dig up more of the series the next time I'm at the library. show less

Someone recommended this book to me as an accessible introduction to manga. Even though I needed to keep a diagram beside me to help me read the panes in the correct order, I enjoyed this mildly humorous collection of stories about a bubbly green-haired girl. A good place to start.

I realized today while I was reading Yotsuba&! that this was probably the first manga I actually ever read. Probably when I was younger I skimmed through some Yugioh, Pokemon, and whatever was in my brothers Shonen Jump magazines from the late 90's, but Yotsuba&! was really my first time reading manga. I read the first few volumes in 5th grade when a student came in to school one day with a couple volumes that he checked out from the library, and the whole class took turns reading these books. Yotsuba&! was a gold mine of comedy for me at the time, and I still chuckled at a few scenes in the first volume. I actually originally thought I'd give this 5 stars because of nostalgia, but that clearly isn't the case. This is still a great show more first volume that I would probably show to young manga readers, but there are some jokes the clearly haven't aged as well as others. show less

With this book, I'm continuing my exploration of manga. This series is about Yotsuba, a young girl who moves with her father into a house new to them. She meets the family next door and often engages in activities with the younger two of the three daughters of that family, although all are older than Yotsuba.

This book is very cute, with Yotsuba being gregarious and mischievous. Some frames are laugh-out-loud funny. I like the characters very much, including Yotsuba who has green hair in four ponytails, her laid-back dad, her dad's huge friend Jumbo, and the oldest of the three sisters who frequently puts a damper on Yotsuba's activities.

My favorite chapter was the one called "Yotsuba & Cicadas" simply because I love when the cicadas show more come out in full force some years in my own neighborhood in the USA. show less

Yotsuba&! is hilarious and has became a comfort manga for me. I'd recommend it to anyone who likes comedy manga. The series is hard to find in bookstores, but if you come across it, it's worth picking up.