Potter, Alexander, and Martin H. Greenberg, eds. - Assassin Fantastic

Um, yes, I caved and borrowed this from the library, despite the ubiquitous Greenberg name and the Valdemar-esque cover art because... assassins!

I am so predictable.

Sadly, none of the stories really hit my buttons, which is somewhat amazing, given that it's a rather large button. Anyhow, my favorites were probably Teresa Edgerton's short, set in the same universe as The Queen's Necklace (which I must hunt down), except I didn't like the ending, and Rosemary Edghill's short, which involves one assassin sort of stalking another. Oh, Lynn Flewelling's "The Raven's Cut" was also effectively scary. But I still missed my cold-hearted female assassins.

Oh well.

Aida Yu - Gunslinger Girl, vol. 01-02 (Eng. trans.)

The cover of Gunslinger Girl has a pre-adolescent, innocent-looking girl with a sad face wielding a giant machine gun.

Have I mentioned how predictable I was?

In a manga-version of Italy (aka, set there so people can have names like Giuseppe and Tiela and go to assorted piazzas), there's a government agency that takes in young girls when they're near death and makes them into cyborgs. The girls are conditioned to be assassins and paired up with a handler (almost always an adult male), with whom they train and go on missions. The series so far is really a bunch of shorts on the girls in the program, all of whom are struggling with being human and normal when they're cyborg killing machines. There are ruminations on the messed-up nature of the cyborg/handler relationship -- some handlers treat their assignees as tools, others treat them as daughters, and thankfully, there are no horribly squickly Lolita-like fantasies. There's lots of angst.

The art is a bit blocky and not always wonderful, but of course, I love it to pieces. I have also stuck the anime in my Netflix queue. rachelmanija, I'm not sure if this hits your bulletproof kink, given that they're not mutants, but it is a school of special kids.

I was getting a little tired of the one-offs and wanted a longer, angstier arc, but I suspect I will keep reading this because... angsty little girls who are cyborg killing machines!

Larbalestier, Justine - Magic Lessons

Second in a trilogy that starts with Magic or Madness.

( Spoilers for Magic or Madness )

( Spoilers for this book )

Links:
- rilina's review