Buy Spice and Wolf, Vol. 2

If you've been hesitating to purchase this volume due to the cover art of the previous volume, rest assured- Yen Press has heard your complaints. The books now have the original artwork on the book itself, while the "realistic" covers are now a slip cover. That really is a marked improvement, I must say. While I understand what they were trying to go for, the target audience for these books is the manga & anime crowd. (Especially since these books are almost always placed in the manga section in bookstores.)

In this second volume of "Spice & Wolf", we find our favorite merchant & wolf girl attempting to sell a bag of pepper for a large price. When they discover that the man buying it is using less than honest means to secure a good price, they manage to finagle a good amount of expensive armor from him. Unfortunately they all too soon discover that their "good fortune" was anything but & Lawrence is now in a very sizable amount of death. In order to avoid being sold to a slave ship, Lawrence & Holo must undertake a very dangerous scheme involving their debtors, a lovely young shepherdess, & a dangerous stretch of woods!

I really enjoyed this more than I did the first volume. The translation seems to be far smoother than in the first book. I also enjoyed the information on the merchant trade, which seems to be one of the big driving forces of the series- second only to the slow chemistry that is building between our two main characters. Hasekura could have easily made this book into something more supernatural & romance driven, but his choice to make the merchant life the focus has served him well.

I also enjoyed the new characters in the book- it'll be interesting to see if any of them pop back up in the series later, especially Norah. As always, the illustrations in this are gorgeous, especially the full color versions at the beginning of the book. (Holo fans will be glad to know that they will see quite a bit of her in one of the illustrations!)

If you haven't read the first book, I recommend that you start there first. Even though it is only the second volume, there is already enough going on to where newcomers will have a bit of a problem catching up on the story. Even if you read about the first volume on the web, you are still losing out on a treat! (Now I just have to track down a copy of the first version that has the slipcover with it!)Get more detail about Spice and Wolf, Vol. 2.