But I enjoy every minute of it!
Seriously, though: Before we begin, I would like to apologize for a slight fudging of my last manga review for Wonderland. I wanted to review nine new manga of this new year for 2019, but Wonderland Volume 1, I believe, released here in America back somewhere around December 2018. I was just so excited to share a genuinely new and intriguing manga with all my followers (all three!) that I decided to fudge a little.
I hope we can still be friends. ;)
That being said, I follow Yen Press on Twitter, and they posted a schedule of new manga releases one day. Now, I love yuri, so I decided to pick this little beauty up this afternoon. (Plus "Dive" was all sporty and never once slowed down to tell us what anything meant. Just like every other sports manga! Grr!)
High school student Hime Shiraki may look like an angel, but she's actually a greedy little devil! Hime has been polishing her looks, all for the day she becomes a rich man's wife (out of desire, not out of an arrangement). But all that changes one day when she runs into and injures a young girl from the Liebe Girls' Academy Cafe.
Yep, you read that right: Academy Cafe. It's like a role-playing butler cafe-type place, but with schoolgirls.
Now, I've never been to a proper maid/butler cafe. But the one I have gone to sucked ass! Dinky little food, bad acting and poorly-choreographed dancing, stupid "getting to know you" games for all the customers, and they even charged you for taking pictures! Not to mention only one damn maid in the bunch!
Phew...rant over.
But, keeping up the act, as well as doing it right, proves tough for Hime, particularly when the cool and beautiful Mitsuki Ayanokouji-senpai keeps getting on her case for messing up. And, when Hime's shy, bespectacled friend Kanoko follows her to work one day, she is also dragged into the madness! And the fun continues when Hime and Ayanokouji are paired together as lovey-dovey Big Sister/Little Sister types, a la Strawberry Panic (a just-okay series, in my humble opinion).
When Hime confesses about her facade to a closed changing room, as well as about her feelings for Ayanokouji, thinking it's Kanoko in there, the curtain pulls back to reveal none other than Ayanokouji herself!
Hime spends the next few days panicking until she and Ayanokouji sit and talk it out. As it turns out, Hime was once found out by a disagreeable girl in her grade school, which left Hime ostracized and with a complex about it. And that girl's name? Mitsuki Yano, Mitsuki Ayanokouji's true identity!
Now, this series isn't hot or anything, but it's sweet, but not in a sick way. The characters aren't near-featureless moe blobs, but don't expect a ton of fanservice. This is a realistic series. And, since this volume ended on such a big shocking revelation, I, for one, think I'll continue reading.
There's been a real resurgence of yuri/lesbian manga here in the U.S. for the last couple of years now, with things like Kase-san, Murcielago, Harukana Receive, Citrus and Netsuzou Trap smacking our shelves. Some have been hot, some have been sweet, but none have yet to achieve that crucial balance, as far as this reader is concerned.
(This one hasn't, either, but we'll all keep our fingers crossed for the future!)
