Beastars volume 3 has two major sections. The first takes place at the school and shows how the drama club operates after the dramatic events of the previous book. In this section legoshi also tries to deepen his relationship with Haru, the dwarf rabbit he met in volume 2, and has a run in with a new character, a female gray wolf, the same species as him. In the second section of the book we get to see what it’s like outside the school for the first time. A few of the carnivorous drama club members go downtown under orders from Louis. They end up in the black market, a place where carnivores can purchase the meat and blood of other animals.
This book is a great example of worldbuilding. The world of beastars is completely different from our own, and the people living there have very different problems than we do, but the author is able to portray these foreign issues and this different world in a way that makes them interesting and easy to understand. A trap that many series fall into during worldbuilding is having too much exposition clumped together and thrown at the audience all at once. Beastars is not one of those series, the exposition is spread out and instead of being told through dialogue, it’s told through stories and is something the audience observes, instead of being directly told. A perfect example of this is the side story in the middle of this book about another student at the school who has a part time job laying eggs for the carnivorous students to eat. This answers many questions the readers probably had like, “If the carnivores can’t get meat from other animals, how do they survive? It’s not like meat grows on trees or something.” With this chapter they learn the answer to their question, not through boring dialogue, but an interesting story about another student.
The worldbuilding isn’t the only good part about the book, the dialogue is realistic so conversations between characters sound like things people would actually say to each other which is an effective way to immerse the reader in the story. The characters are all interesting but not over the top. They feel like real people and they’re consistent, never doing anything that feels out of character.
I would recommend this to anyone who enjoyed the previous book, or people who might be interested in writing their own stories. Overall, I would rate it a 4.5/5