Kino's Journey: Idle Adventurer, Volume 1

Mix The Twilight Zone with Knight Rider, stir in a few anime tropes, and you have Kino's Journey, in which a lone young traveler rides down desolate roads on her talking motorcycle Hermes, stopping along the way in strange villages where people engage in peculiar behavior. At one location an entire town refuses to set foot outside of their homes due to an old and dark secret which has infected the community. At another place, Kino and Hermes ride through a snowstorm and discover people stranded in a truck without food or water since the start of winter. The surprise twists on the extreme environments within each of the four episodes collected here are generally telegraphed well in advance of their endings, which takes out some of the jolt, but Kino's Journey is a visually striking and fairly entertaining diversion overall (even the dime-story philosophic pondering actually has its own sense of naïve charm--especially when the meaning of life is being explained by a talking motorcycle). Rated 15-up, this dual language first volume in the oddball adventures of a girl and her motorcycle is recommended. [Note: Kino's Journey: Emerging Lanes, Vol. 2 is also newly available, with Warning--Curves Ahead, Vol. 3 slated for release on May 18.] Aud: P. (P. Hall)