Gunslinger Girl, Volume 1 Book

This is one of those series I feel bad loving as much as I do. On the surface, the story is very clear and easy to dismiss if one chooses to. It's about an agency that takes young girls (from 10 to 14, 16 at the oldest later on) and turns them into cyborgs who then learn how to fight like soldiers.

It's a little twisted, but it's right up my alley. Each girl has a sad story to tell. These girls were not normal little girls pulled off the street. The one we meet at the beginning, Henrietta, is the sole survivor of a vicious attack on her family that leaves the rest of her family dead and her gravely wounded.

What drives this manga for me are the characters. Everyone has a point of view in this story. The cyborg girls who are forced to love their "handlers" (also called "brothers" to make the relationship clear here), the men who train and partner with these cyborg girls, and even the bad guys who are terrorists. Nothing is simple, and no one is purely innocent. Not even the girls who have the dirtiest hands of all.

Most interesting to me, especially in the first season of the anime, is how much is said between the words. The anime (first season) is so quiet. A smile is never just a smile though. This is something that the manga handles so well. It's easy to overdo it in a story like this, but instead it sticks to simple imagery which says so much. When it does get gory, it's never done lightly.