By Dustin Cabeal

After my last review for 7th Garden, I was sure I wouldn’t come back for another review. Hold on, before you get excited, this is still going to be a very critical review. It’s just that I was surprised I had anything left in the tank for this series which continues to cherry pick small aspects of religions and make them feel awkward and ill-thought out.

With this being the fourth volume it’s the obvious choice for an origin story, right? What? No, not right. But that’s what happens; we spend the entire volume going over Awyn Gardner’s origin and how he got that stupid last name. Spoiler, it was given to him because of his gardening skills. That was a brain buster to figure, let me tell ya. Yeah, that’s it. His origin is that he went from being a rich kid to the child of a demon all because of the angels fucked over his family. He’s also got some dark side following him around in his brain. Eventually, he kidnapped the girl he’s in love with, they adopted him and blah, blah, blah. The head housekeeper beats the shit out of him a couple of times and does a great victory pose, which is the only time I felt any kind of emotion while reading this volume.

This is just a weird place to put this story. The first three volumes have barely cracked the overall plot, but here the series rehashes what led the story to the present. Hopefully, readers will remember where the story was huh? Can you imagine reading an origin story for a year and then diving back into the main story? Would you even care about the plot at that point? It’s hard to imagine caring in the next volume.

What this ends up coming across as is a cleanup job of the messy start to the series. It’s as if the creator got picked up as a regular, then had time to figure out how to make the rest of it not so sloppy, because the rest of the story is sloppy. The explanations that are presented in the previous volume are shoestring at best, and then this volume comes along and ties everything together with a bit more thought, but ultimately, it's all a little too late. If this were the first volume, maybe it would be forgivable, and maybe it would have dragged my interest a bit further, but it’s the fourth volume, and it’s really out of place. Everyone’s goals seem pathetic and poorly planned, but I’m sure in another few volumes the creator will just do the same and go back and explain everything they should have already told the reader.

Morbid curiosity might get me to read one more volume, but as far as reviews go, this series isn’t worth the time or effort. There’s nothing new here, it’s all cherry-picked ideas slammed together and presented as cherry pie, but it’s not. It’s a disappointment pie, which tastes awful and leaves you very upset.

Score: 2/5

7th Garden vol. 4
Creator: Mitsu Izumi
Publisher: Viz Media