Rabbit Doubt by Yoshiki Tonogai... A Review of the 2 Book Manga Series

Rabbit Doubt by Yoshiki Tonogai... There's a game going around Japan called 'Rabbit Doubt'. The premise of the game is that all of the players are rabbits in a colony, and one amongst them is randomly chosen to be a wolf that infiltrated the group of rabbits. Every round, the wolf kills off a rabbit, and every round, the group tries to figure out which of the rabbits is actually a wolf in disguise. Sometimes the kids who play this game decide to meet up in person, and Yuu, Mitsuki, Rei, Hajime, Eiji, and Haruka have done just that. Unfortunately, one of them has decided to take on the mantle of the wolf and has already killed once.

When I read about this Manga, the premise intrigued me. It had something a little "more" than the average Manga story. It's a guessing game, a deadly guessing game, and the reader is guessing right along with the characters involved. And the story is good! The artwork is good too, although at the very beginning I was confusing a couple of the girl characters because they looked so similar. But that worked out as soon as "the game" began...

So, what about the story and "the game"? The start of the story is about this group of kids who play this game called Doubt (or Rabbit Doubt) virtually, on their cellphones, and who decide to actually meet. After they get together, and we start to get acquainted with them ourselves, they decide to go out. Strange things happen and then mysteriously, no one can remember how, they all wind up in this abandoned building. The doors are all locked. Everyone has a bar code tattooed on them, which they are soon to discover can open certain doors. Can they work together to get out of there?! When one of them dies, they know that they are playing "the game" for real and must determine who the wolf is before everyone dies. This pits them against each other to a point, with fingers pointing and accusations flying until they start to try and solve the mystery of who has had the opportunity to kill. And YOU are trying to solve the mystery right along with them!

The story just slowly draws you in until you are turning those pages to see what happens next...

I'm not going to reveal anything here to spoil it for you, just know that this is a 2 book series. Book 1 ends with 2 people and the killer, and we still aren't quite sure who is who, which leads the reader to Book 2, which starts where Book 1 left off and then a killer plot twist (sorry had to use that) half way through the story and another twist at the end! I did not expect the plot twist in the middle, and then another plot twist makes this a better than average Manga. Plus there's a little opening at the end for possibly another story to come along.

Book 1 is 398 pages... Book 2 is 445 pages. It took me a couple of days to read them both, because I just had to keep reading along. I only bought Book 1 at first, but when I got to the end of it, I HAD to pick up the next book, so be warned you'll want to know how it ends and you can only find out in the next book.

*P.S. There is some violence here, so I would not recommend for very young readers.