About the Mangaka

Jessica Steele is a prolific writer, with over eighty books to her credit. She started writing in 1979 and is still producing novels today. All of them are romance novels published in the UK by Mills & Boon, and in the US by Harlequin.

I couldn’t find anything about Chizuko Beppu sorry. Beyond he (or she) has also released one other shojo title in a magazine called Nakayoshi, called Amai Koi no Binzume.

About the Manga

I have to admit that it was with a hell of a lot of anxiety I started to read this. My experience with Harlequin’s other title had left a very nasty after taste. However I was pleased to not only enjoy the volume, but find it markedly improved overall. Though at times it still looks like a bad scanlation.

I don’t know why, but for some reason I really like the cover for this volume, it looks really good. Though a bit creepy, but I think that’s due to the way Magnus is drawn.

The art for this volume is perfect, shojo art at it’s finest. The lines are hard and fast, but still maintain the fluidity and airy feel that’s the trademark of shojo. My only real gripe about the art is that the main male lead, Magnus, looks rather creepy for most part of the volume. In fact it would be easy to see him as the main villain in a series cause of his creepy eyes.

That’s just a minor gripe on art style of my own though, and if I’m honest I didn’t care that much cause I loved reading it

The other main lead, Taye, is a refreshing change from the usual shojo norm.. Rather than being the usual plain girl, who becomes stunningly pretty with a quick make over, she’s actually rather pretty from the start.  I also liked the way she wasn’t obnoxious, breaking yet another shojo norm. Her character design was stunning from the start, and stays that way through out the volume. Beppu is a stunning artist who brings her (I’m assuming Beppu is a her here) characters to life.

The other aspect that I found amazing was the support and secondary characters. We have several of those in this volume and they were all extremely well drawn and well developed. That gets a big thumbs up from me

The story that Jessica writes is typical of the Mills & Boon stable, and fits perfectly with the shojo genre. The rewriting to convert it from an adult romance (the original version would be a josei) to a shojo works really well. The story is engaging, easy to follow and what’s more has an easy ending.

The characters are likeable, with well defined personalities that really make for funny times.

The only thing that I would say is wrong with this volume is that it’s to short. The page count is barely over one hundred-twenty pages. I would have liked to have seen a higher page count with more relationship building going on between Magnus and Taye.

While it’s not the usual hate him one minute madly in love the next, it would have been great to see their relationship develop properly. Though the fact that there was always a spark of interest there from the start made the change more palatable.

Harlequin made a huge improvement over the last title I read from them. No empty speech bubbles and the translation felt smooth and flowed well. Once again though where they dropped the ball was on editing. Once again the way they edited the pages was sloppily done. It over runs the bubbles practically all the time. This is find insane considering the amount of remainder space left in the bubbles. I hope they learn how to edit properly otherwise it’ll be a failure of epic proportions.

However it’s a better attempt, and it’s a lot easier reading, so it’s not a huge issue.

Where to Buy

As with the other Harlequin release this is a digital only release, no paper version is planned at the current time. Also the Kindle version can be read on your desktop using the Kindle Desktop Software

• eManga or Amazon US Kindle Store