The second volume of the series picks up almost exactly where the first left off. In fact, I suspect the series would read better all at once instead of single volumes separated by a great deal of time. This is another point where longer volumes might be helpful, but apparently that is not to be. Because you can only read so many pages in between surfing/boarding/skating/rocking, dude/dudette/homie/dawg. Word.

If you can’t tell this series is trying to be hip and contemporary, you’re probably from a very different culture. This aside, it does succeed in feeling like authentic pieces of the lives of real characters. Maybe there are a lot of people who connect to the surfing scene, but more likely readers will simply be interested in the characters as people (and hey, there will be someone to represent your ethnicity). It also manages to be funny in a variety of places. You could do a lot worse, anyway.

A series like this runs on its characters, which is why it is good there are a multitude of connections and relationships. I wish there weren’t so many one-sided romances and crushes thrown into this mix, but I guess we’re aiming for teenagers, aren’t we? However, there are at least a few completely platonic relationships, and hopefully these healthy kinds of things will continue to be modeled in future volumes. Not on that account, we have our first real character who gets an introduction: Zip joins the cast as a slightly different type.

One of the greatest weaknesses of this series is also what makes it difficult to review: each volume is a slim number of pages offering only a scattered collection of fragments. There are so many characters and scenes that, while there is a great deal going on, relatively little content is actually addressed. This is much more obvious in the second volume, where each of the many subplots that was introduced advances only very slightly.

Hence I feel as though I have relatively little content to analyze, only pieces of content. Some of those are indeed interesting, but we know too little or they are too undeveloped for commentary. Since I assume none of you are here to read me harping about minor details (and I don’t want to lose the generally succinct form of these reviews), my comments on these volumes will be somewhat shorter until more is revealed. Regardless, this is the kind of series where you will either like the style or you’ll have little interest.