Reborn!

This ludicrous comedy has the occasional flash of cleverness, buffered by reliance on an utterly silly plot device, and typical manga art. Tsuna is a nervous middle-schooler whose mother hires a tutor for him, Reborn, who looks like a doe-eyed baby in a suit and fedora. Reborn soon shoots Tsuna in the forehead with a magical bullet. Anyone hit with the bullet "faces his own death and is flooded with desperate regrets about what he's failed to accomplish." He is also given superhuman strength for a few moments in order to correct the regret, before reverting to a normal—hopefully better—person. The bullet turns out to be an age-old secret of the Italian Mafia—and Reborn is using it on Tsuna in order to raise him up to be the 10th boss of the Vongola family. In episodic fashion, Tsuna uses the powers of the "deathperation shot" to profess his love for a girl, prevent a fellow student from committing suicide and score a point in a kendo match. Adults will undoubtedly have a problem with a chapter about Russian roulette; most readers will find their nerves dulled by the constant gunshots, explosions and other action elements. (Nov.)