This review may content spoilers

"A story that starts badly usually ends in carnage."
I'm not saying that, the author herself wrote this, word for word, or at least what the translation tried to make me understand on the back of the second volume (Because I bought them, like any human being ). I am impressed of how honest she was by writing this, seeing how disgusting this manga was. As her first manga, maybe she could put it forward, but nope: devalued, depressed, desperate, all what it sadly deserved. But why tho? How did I get to read this and falling in some kind of traps full of despair. Why did I disliked it?

What a stupid question to ask myself, because what was I expecting? One of the main reasons I wanted to read Children was for the charming, bloody art style on the cover and also because I saw Happy Sugar Life and U-12 in the recommendations, which mostly focused on HSL. It's the story of an adult named Toru Igarashi, looking for a place to make a lot of money. After a random recommendation, he goes to an orphanage where he will meet Sakurako Shimizu, the "mother" of the many orphans living here. Keep in mind I really want to quote "mother", she's actually a murderer, manipulating her orphans and teaching them to kill in the worst way possible, passing by passers-by to yakuza.

So yeah. Let's put HSL and U-12 in a blender. Was it seriously a good idea?! Clearly not! Unless you're one of these people liking to see other people being tortured and getting their limbs savagely cutted by an axe... Even then, I don't think we could find much enjoyement into that too. None of the character presented into this seemed outstanding, they mostly are developped trough flashback. The story goes way to fast for giving us time to admire and prefers stuffing us more and more of overused clichés to pack the whole thing up, making it a much more unpleasant experience. The drawings are fine, but also confusing to see who does which actions in what time and can sometimes makes the rest of story more obvious and unsurprising with the writing. Seeing a little girl despairly trying to get out of the orphanage despite knowing that she might get killed during the process, 'cause what kind of unlogical horror manga will it be if there wasn't some kind of dark side... Maybe I'd be terrorised if it was in the first manga that I've read, but when you know the clichés, we don't feel anything when these moments happen. We feel empty. Just like the protagonist.

There's not much to complain about Children because of how short it is, I just know that there's other manga that does well their jobs in their storytelling. Go read Happy Sugar Life if you want to live the story of a cute girl wanting to protect an other cute girl like a mom/wife, or go read U-12 if you want cute girls beating the shit out of buffed perverted grown men. You'd feel more accomplished by reading these instead of two volumes of that rushed story labelled "Children".