The Promised Neverland Review

Grace Field House is a happy orphanage with a gentle mother, good food and a daily test, and every child is adopted out by the age of twelve. In the first chapter Emma and Norman follow a departing girl to the gate and learn what adoption means: the house is a farm, the tests grow better brains, and the customers are demons. The escape that follows, planned by three eleven year olds under the eye of a caretaker every bit as clever as they are, is as tense as anything Weekly Shonen Jump has run, and it is built on rules the reader can check.

Posuka Demizu's art is the other half of the book's reputation. The children are drawn with enormous expressive range, Isabella's smile is genuinely frightening, and the masked, many eyed demons look like nothing else in the magazine. After the escape Kaiu Shirai widens the story into demon politics, a hunting preserve for aristocrats and an ancient promise between species, and while the Goldy Pond arc has real momentum, the final arcs compress years of plot into a handful of chapters and settle the biggest questions by negotiation. The consensus is consistent: an extraordinary first arc, a good story overall, and an ending that arrives in a hurry.