About the Mangaka

This appears to be Ogami Yuno’s first and only work to date. Other than that, not a lot of information available sadly, though she does seem to have a blog. Though it’s all japanese, and google translator sucks beyond belief >.<

About the Manga

L'Etoile Solitaire

What can I say, another great read from the June label. It’s titles like this that convince me there’s more to yaoi than sexual deviants out to rape every guy they meet (which seems to make up a large chunk of yaoi titles).

Titles like this really work well with me, sort of true love, romance and you know all that other sickly sweet stuff you usually find in shojo hehe.

The first thing I noticed was the cover, swap one of the guys for a gal and you’d have a perfectly good shojo cover. But this is a yaoi title, and the cover still looks awesome. It seems to be a thing with June to have a sort of sweet, light, and really pink cover. Sometimes it works, other times it doesn’t. This time it worked brilliantly and I loved the cover (so much so I’ve just ordered my own print copy).

Edit: I’ve just found that the cover above is only available on the eManga site. Apparently print versions of the volume come with a different version of the cover:

9781569708811

Not really sure I like this cover, something about it feels a bit wrong to me. I prefer the eManga version :(

The one thing I can rarely fault with yaoi is it’s art. Most true yaoi (as in coming from Japan), usually have excellent art through out, and so does this one. The characters are all well developed, well drawn, and full of life.

I really liked Yuuki, his soft naiveté is a given in yaoi titles, but I have to admit I still like him. His design is a well balanced mix of cute feminism, and a the masculine aspects. That’s one of the areas I’ve found tend to go overboard, but Yuno balances it just right.

The result is was have a character who still looks like a guy, has a soft hint around him, but doesn’t feel wrong. In fact I really found myself liking him, and think he’s definitely one of the better yaoi leads I’ve come across.

Micah on the other hand I wasn’t so sure about at first. He wasn’t so much wrong, as he felt to stiff and rigid, as though he didn’t fit the role quite right. As I went through the volume I realised that that was Yuno’s intent. To portray him as a character that wasn’t quite right, that changed over the course of the volume.

While I liked his character design at first, I did find myself wincing a bit at his shoulders at times. Several scenes in the volume gave him shoulders that I felt were way to broad, he looked like he had a pair of ladders attached to his back. Thankfully these only happened a few times, but they did sour the scenes a bit for me. Especially since he looked like was about to smoother Yuuki, rather than giving him a hug >.<

The story was pretty generic and yeah cliché as hell, but lets face it it’s hard to do anything novel in a manga these days, since it’s all been done already. However Yuno took the usual elements and told a great true love story, that flows well and doesn’t feel over cloying.

Naturally this being a yaoi title there are several sex scenes, and I have to admit that Yuno did an excellent job with them. Rather than just having them in for the sake of having them, which is something else I hate about the yaoi genre, Yuno works them into the romance, and has several fumbling starts. For me this heightened the “love” aspect of the story, and I found I liked the way they played out.

The only exception to that was the after chapter, sort of an omake chapter. I felt the sex scenes there were more for just having a sex scene than anything else. However I can easily overlook that since everything before it was amazing, and lets face it, in such a short chapter it was inevitable.

June did a pretty good job on this release, with a good smooth translation that flows well and doesn’t feel silted or rewritten. They also had a good choice of fonts making things easy to read and follow.

All told it was an excellent read, and one I’m more than happy to put on my Essential Read List

Where to Buy

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