Wataru Watanabe

Not as thrilling this time around as the protagonist is only featured in the first chapter and the rest of the enormous book focuses first on farewell races between the departing seniors and their underclassmen at Sohoku and Hakone high schools, and then on a soul-searching journey by one of the Sohoku secondary characters to his home town of Osaka where he ends up in a race with a high-stakes bet against one of his team's rivals.

You know, it would be okay if the characters got off their bikes once in a while and went to some classes or out to a restaurant or something.… (mere)

I hate bikes because they are just torture devices, and I hate bicyclists as most of them are sociopaths who think they have the right of way on all roads and sidewalks always and imagine themselves greatly wronged if forced to apply their brakes because a light changes color or a pedestrian happens to exist and will ride in the automobile lanes even when the street has a bike lane right there and . . . and I just really hate them.

But I love this series about bicycle racing so much.

The last ten volumes of this omnibus series have covered a single three-day race competition. That's like 18 or 19 volumes of the original series. The first 116 pages of this fat book cover the final 500 meters. Less than a third of a mile! I could walk that in five minutes, so I have to assume bicyclists can do it in a fraction of that time even going uphill.

And yet my pulse was racing the whole time. And all the team spirit just gives me warm fuzzies.

I could have done with a little more downtime for bonding and training in the middle of the book, but after quick introductions to the new riders who will take the place of the graduating seniors, we're already in the middle of the next race by the time the cliffhanger comes.… (mere)