Customer Reviews

Tarot Cafe, The Volume 5

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With this issue the series finally begins to weave the back stories of the main characters, and their real relationships with each other over the centuries. This helps flesh out an understanding of things, but seems to do so with the loss of the interesting 'side stories' that the first few issues presented along the way that gives the series some of it's charm.

you first start a series, love it. read the second book, love it. the third book...something seems amiss. read the fourth book...you dont like it. read the fifth book...you find out that the fourth book wasn't a mistake and the series is, indeed, falling flat. so...i'm done with this series.

honestly, the whole backstory with pamela isn't that interesting and choosing the focus on the backstory instead of the collection of tarot-related short stories takes away from the original charm and wonder of the first two books. the allusion to the tarot cards in the last two volumes was stretched a bit thin...irrelevent (though still beautiful) illustrations of the tarot cards are placed within the story. in the first two volumes, the illustrations were integral to the stories.

it doesnt seem like the tarot cafe is going to return to the short-story-collection format of the first few volumes, which is a disappointment. I hate to say it, but i think i cared more about the cat boy and the alchemist than i ever will about pamela.

Sang-Son Pak, Tarot Cafè, vol. 5 (Tokyopop, 2004)

The fifth volume of Pak's series focuses mostly on its middle story, in which Pamela returns to Scotland for the first time in hundreds of years to search for the truth behind memories she's blocked from her mind since fleeing the country. The beginning frame story is the conclusion of the Leanan Sidhe line from vol. 4, while the ending short tells us of the friendship between a young, abused boy and an old (very old) man who wants to protect the boy from his father, but feels helpless. Also includes a twenty-page preview of Pak's newest series, Ark Angels. As with the rest of the volumes in the series, it's not bad, but suffers greatly from that malady which affects many shojo writers of making male characters both overly feminine and all quite similar-looking, to the point where it's sometimes tough to tell them apart. ***