Riviere and the Land of Prayer Manga Volume 1 Review – Review

Despite being raised Catholic and going to a Catholic high school, I don’t consider myself a very religious person. The idea of praying for a better life can be found throughout multiple religions and there is a certain level of comfort in praying to some higher power for a better life. Prayer is at the heart of Riviere and the Land of Prayer as in the story, and has the power akin to making a wish. But just like making wishes, you should be careful what you pray for….sometimes?

At first, Riviere feels like it’s setting itself up to be a story about the consequences of having your prayers answered. Our main character MacMillia starts the story by being put in a monkey’s paw situation. She prays to get a job where she can’t get fired and so that gets interpreted as her never being able to get hired for a job ever again. She gets that curse broken, but then it ironically forces her to serve as an assistant for this mysterious woman who seems to have the ability to break curses. I was thinking of xxxHOLiC throughout the first third of this volume, as the story seems to be setting up to tackle more of these unorthodox prayers.

In actuality, what follows the first third of the volume is significantly less interesting than what is originally set up. The remaining two-thirds is dedicated to establishing exactly how magic and the prayer system of this society work. The next major story in the book seems to be about pursuing someone who is abusing the use of prayer for the sake of gambling. However, she doesn’t seem to be cursed for her prayers in the same way our main character was, which makes me wonder why MacMillia’s prayer was originally treated as a curse and this one wasn’t. It feels like an episodic series where our leads go out and take care of different problems to keep the town’s peace. But it’s hard to do that when the story doesn’t establish the rules of its world. At best, there seems to be a disconnect between how dangerous the prayers are and how necessary they are for keeping the peace—at worst, it forces me to think about world-building in a way the story doesn’t want me to.

This volume has a lot of history and exposition accompanied by some very nice set dressing and, to the volume’s credit, the art design of the whole story seems to take on a storybook approach. The idea of magic and witches is something you would find in a fairytale, while scenes of exposition are delivered with a style that looks like they’re pulled right out of a pop-up book. The character designs are also rather appealing, even if everyone looks super young. The problem is that the story goes too hard into its history too soon before setting up the workings of its prayer system. How often do people’s prayers come true? How often do they turn into curses? If curses are so common, why is it repeatedly said that this town is a sort of utopia where everyone can get along?

Plus, despite getting a lot of information about some character history, we get next to no real sense of who our characters even are. Outside of exposition, the dialogue feels disjointed and there isn’t a sense of established chemistry between everyone involved. Some of this is clearly for the sake of establishing an ongoing mystery. I don’t need to know everything about everyone in volume one but it isn’t engaging enough to be excited about more down the road.

The writer seemed more concerned with establishing lore than writing characters after they got the initial premise set up. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that approach, if that is what the writer wanted. I just think that led to an unbalanced and uninteresting narrative, which is a shame because it did feel gripping at the beginning. Maybe the story I am hoping for or expecting will be in volume two. Unfortunately, I won’t be reviewing later volumes as I don’t really see a reason to continue based on this volume.