Why did I start reading it?
Well, I've enjoyed 4 books so far so why stop? Here are my reviews for them:
What is it?
Magical Girl Raising Project as a series is based on the idea of magical girl battle royales and with book five we enter the third battle.
There's a criminal magical girl in B city. One group wants to apprehend her, one group wants to protect her and one group are a bunch of newbies caught up in something they don't really understand. Treated to a new group of sixteen magical girls battles commence across B city.
What are the characters like?
We have a really interesting cast. I'll get into it a bit further down but, other than the one group most of the magical girls in this book are veterans who have been working with the Magical Kingdom for years. They've had time to explore their magic, time to figure out all the weird ways they can use it and they all have some really cool skills.
Anyone particularly cool? A lot of the girls are pretty cool in this book. My favourites though are Achfied Pam, Postarie, Kuru-kuru Hime and Tepsekemei. So in that order here's why, Pam has an interesting connection to the first book and though her power sounds a bit boring the way she uses it is great. From what I can tell she is one of the oldest magical girls and had a long, long time to master her magic and it shows in her fights. Postarie is a poor girl who just kinda got dragged along with what was going on because her only fiend wanted to. I feel really bad for her because she seems to be the main one in the group that realises the gravity of the situation they are in but no one listens to her. Kuru-Kuru Hime was out first point-of-view character for this story and she's pretty interesting too. She was a teacher and is only going along with this because she wants to safeguard her students. The development she got through this book was interesting and I really appreciate her character. And finally Tepsekemei...who I can't really talk about without ruining her character but she is a good...girl. Also a special mention for Ripple's return!
What's the bad news? The main downside of this book is it's 90% set up. The girls form three factions and a lot of the book is dedicated to setting up those factions, explaining how they came together, their motivations, powers and backstories. It's understandable as this isn't a simple recruitment with newbies like the first book or an incident isolated in cyber-space like the second battles. This one happens in real life, with powers of the Magical Kingdom involved which is cool and all but the pacing suffers sometimes for it.
And the good news? On the other hand, it's great because I've been wanting Magical Girl Raising Project to take some time to tell me about some of this stuff for ages! Just what is the Magical Kingdom? How does it work? I was so happy with 7753 came in and basically explained she was the Magical Kingdom's therapist. There is a lot of politics in this book but it was all things I had been wondering since I read the first book. It goes through whether magical girls are paid, how to get into working for the Magical Kingdom, departments in the Magical Kingdom, crime and punishment in the Magical Kingdom. It's all I've been wanting from this series for a while and was fun to find out. It's also really surprised me cause there is something the book didn't do that I was expecting all the way through...I'm dreading the next one...
Would you recommend? Yeah! If you've been liking the series, don't stop now. This book surprised me and I'm scared of what's planned in the next one.