Ao Haru Ride is the current shojo series I’m most invested in. Volume 2 continues its air of melancholic and uncertain young love by moving its leads, Futaba and Kou, into the same school class. Futaba has taken the lessons of the first book to heart, trying to create a friendlier air in her classroom, but she doesn’t have the popularity or leadership to do so. Refusing to give up, and inspired by wanting Kou to think well of her, […]

I read Takane & Hana volume 6 about a month late. It came out at the perfect time, at the beginning of December, for its content, which starts with a Christmas chapter and continues to New Year’s Eve. I gave up reading the series because we were supposed to believe the businessman and the teenager were in love with each other despite treating each other miserably. I didn’t find it believable or funny or entertaining, just mean. However, the situation […]

After reading Kakuriyo: Bed & Breakfast for Spirits volume 1, I made the following list of cliched elements it has that I’d seen before: A nondescript but kind-hearted girl Takes pity on a mysterious handsome guy Who kidnaps her to a demon realm where he’s the leader And demands she marry him Because her grandfather owes him a debt And she was orphaned when grandfather died a month ago And she has the ability to see supernatural creatures I only […]

The Viz yuri manga series After Hours concludes here as it started — with an emphasis on feeling instead of plot, and prioritizing club life over love. I find in general that yuri series are more elliptical than others. I suspect those looking for that kind of content (or to see characters finding themselves and their feelings) like the uncertainty and ability to read between the lines, while I find it annoying. My trying to puzzle out what was going […]

I enjoyed Suppli, one of the rare josei manga series releases in the US, so when I heard that Viz was putting out a digital-only release of a single volume by artist Mari Okazaki, I knew I had to check it out. (Also, while Kodansha has been prominent in its support of non-mass-market manga titles through digital-only release, I hadn’t realized Viz also did some digital-only. They’re flagged as such on their website, but I don’t know how to get […]

Ran and the Gray World by Aki Irie contains some classic fantasy genre ideas, but the overall tone is unfocused with a touch of creepy. Ran is a magical little girl who appears as a well-developed young woman when she dons a special pair of tennis shoes. Her absent mother temporarily returns in a cloud of magical cakes, with everything too much, showing us where both Ran’s potential for power and her lack of discipline come from. Her older brother […]

When it came out last year, I criticized the previous volume of Arina Tanemura’s age-changing fantasy for not giving us enough of the older version of the character. Idol Dreams volume 5, after wrapping up a competition between the singers, which means plenty of glamour shots of the cute girls in pigtails and short skirts, gives us more with the adult Chikage. However, the storyline isn’t about her. It’s about her patching up the relationship between her friend Tokita and […]

It’s been quite a while since I tried Food Wars — the last book in the series I read, I think, was volume 16 a year and a half ago. I checked out Food Wars: Shokugeki no Soma volume 25 because the publisher was nice enough to send it to me, and at least I could tell what was going on. That’s thanks to the main content being two cook-offs, which are the best part of the series. There are […]