Review: BUZZ!

BUZZ! by Ananth Panagariya
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I liked this book quite a bit. Spelling bees have become huge. Like insanely popular for some reason. It even leads to underground spelling bee competitions. And everyone has a style of spelling that lets them attack their opponent. The premise makes me feel like this could have been a manga. And the art leans that way too, but it is not quite as stylized as most manga tend to be.

The story is pretty straight forward. Webster is a young man who is just entering high school, he has been studying like mad, and he happens to run across an illegal bee that jumpstarts the whole book. The characters he meets there shape how he approaches the rest of the challenges in the book. Of course, they have their own motives and hope that Webster can help them achieve their goals. There is even a group of people out to oppose them. They aren't necessarily bad guys or villains though. It takes on sort of a heist style feeling as Webster and his friends try to take down the group known as the Spelluminati.

Where the book really stood out to me is in the art. The use of color is fantastic. The art is mostly black and white with patches of yellow thrown in to accentuate the characters or events. This really sticks with the whole bee theme going on in the book. The style of the art is cartoonish. It works well with the story and lets the spelling bee moments become a bit more interesting as you see the character spelling the words and shaping the world around them. This was actually quite a bit different in tone and story than I was expecting and the book is better for it.

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