Beastars volume 2 is centred around the drama club’s play, and the actions of the club members. The story follows Legoshi, a timid member of the production crew, and his struggles to interact with people, and help bring the play to life. His first task is simple, to get flowers to decorate the venue, but there he meets someone unexpected, who might make his task more difficult.
The story is very interesting and easy to follow. There’s always something new every chapter to hook you back into the story, making the book incredibly hard to put down. The story isn’t the only interesting part of the book, Itagaki does a great job making the characters feel like real people, giving them unique, believable personalities. Beastars volume 2 has a wide variety of characters, all of them different, and important in their own way, with subtle, complex relationships with the other characters. In particular, the contrast set up between Legoshi, a timid, anxious grey wolf, and Louis, an outgoing, charismatic red deer actor, is executed beautifully. The art on each page is very expressive, especially on pages where a picture takes up the whole page. You can easily tell how a character is feeling at any given moment just from the art, and there are subtle details that add another level of realism to some characters, like Legoshi slouching all the time since he’s self conscious about his size. The use of perspective can make even the smallest mouse feel intimidating, and the largest wolf feel kind. Overall, the book is a great read, and I would recommend it to anyone with an interest in manga, or to people who enjoyed the anime based off of these books. I would give it 4.5/5 stars.