Manga Monday: Does love have to be unplanned?

The truth behind Shiro-sensei's behavior finally becomes clear to even Hina in Suki: A Like Story Volume 3.

Note: Suki: A Like Story Volume 3 is the final volume in a series. For Volume 1 click here, and for Volume 2 click here. Otherwise, read on!

One last romp through London - and beyond - with the Hadrians.

“The Gaslight Chronicles” are finally brought to a close in Cindy Spencer Pape's Ether and Elephants.

Note: Dragons & Dirigibles is the seventh story of the Gaslight Chronicles series. While the stories work well as stand-alones, there are inherent spoilers, especially where the romances are involved.

Manga Monday: Does Hina's goodness prevent her from seeing others clearly?

Hina's sweet nature and love of those around her may make her blind to the dangers around her in Suki: A Like Story Volume 2.

Note: Suki: A Like Story Volume 2 is part of a series. For the review of Volume 1 click here. Otherwise, read on.

Manga Monday: Getting to know a loved one all over again

Mio and Takumi were high school sweethearts...of a sort.They met in high school, but circumstances kept their relationship from developing until after they had graduated. Eventually, though, they finally come together, and a year after they marry their son Yuji comes along.

In most manga, this would be where the story ends. But here, the story is just beginning.

"Archive is a planet of memory. People who have passed away continue to live there as long as someone on Earth remembers them."

So says the picture book that Mio wrote for Yuji before passing away. She promises to come back when when the rainy season starts, and this is where we pick up, in Takuji Ichikawa's Be With You.

It's been a year since Mio has passed away, and her son couldn't be more excited. She promised to come back at the start of the rainy season, and as the weather forecast predicts cloudy skies, Yuji runs outside to find her. His father follows, glad that his son has so much faith in his late wife but not expecting to find anything.

Imagine his surprise when he finds Mio, sitting on the steps of Lab 5. But the discovery is bittersweet, as they realize that she has no memory of her family.

The manga follows the six weeks of the rainy season, as the family slowly  learns about each other again. Yuji turns seven, Takumi has another health scare, and sleeping arraignments have to be renegotiated. Mio might not remember that Yuji is allergic to strawberries, or that her first dates with Takumi were hours of simply talking, but the family was one built on love, and that love can transcend whatever strange magic has brought Mio back to them.

Be with You started out as a novel, and has become a manga, a tv show and a movie. The theme song of the movie was the highest selling single of 2005, which shows some of the love that Japan has for this story. A melancholy, sweet look into the life of a family that is hurting - and healing - Be With You is a lovely one-shot manga to spend an afternoon with.

Highs: In the last chapter, as we see the events from the mother's point of view, is much more of a payoff than I'd expected from a story like this.

Lows: The fact that Yuji calls his father by his first name was extremely confusing at the beginning, but things made more sense as it went.

Verdict: One-shot manga are hard to find, so this is an even better buy than usual.

Further Reading: Be With You (novel), Bunny Drop, The Girl From the Well

Manga Monday: Checking in again with Amir and Karluk

Life in a village, in a land of nomads, makes Amir's new family a valuable target in A Bride's Story Volume 6.

Note: A Bride's Story Volume 6 is part of an ongoing series. Check out the review of Volume 1 here, and Volume 5 here. Otherwise, read on!

Who's to say a lady in trousers would be a bad influence?

Betrayal, human cargo and the Chinese underworld all converge on Black Heath Manor in Cindy Spencer Pape's Dragons & Dirigibles.

Note: Dragons & Dirigibles is the seventh story of the Gaslight Chronicles series. While the stories work well as stand-alones, there are inherent spoilers, especially where the romances are involved.

Manga Monday: A sunny girl with an overcast life

Alongside magical girls and androids named Chi, CLAMP told the story of a lonely girl with a cheerful disposition in Suki: A Like Story Volume 1

On the outside, Hinata Asahi's life seems happy enough. She does well at school and has friends that care about her. She sees the sunny side of every situation and is always trying to cheer up the melancholy people that she's around. Nothing seems to faze this girl.

But a closer look reveals that perhaps her life isn't as perfect as it could be. Every night, Hina goes home to an empty house, with only her teddy bears waiting at the door for her. It's alluded to that she's moved out of her father's home because she wants him to be happy, but how could such a wonderful girl be bringing him sadness?

Early on in the volume, Hina gets a next-door neighbor. The house has been standing empty for awhile, so Hina is curious to see who might be living there. Shiro Asou is a young man who has just moved into the area, and as a matter of fact, is taking over for Hina's homeroom teacher. Hina is elated to have found a new friend, and promptly starts inviting him over for meals and the like. But a few side conversations we overhear Shiro having leaves us wondering if there's more to him than meets the eye.


Suki: A Like Story Volume 1 follows a lot of what has become traditional manga tropes. You have the perpetually cheerful girl, her retinue of friends, the older man to have a crush on, and the mystery of their backstory. The art is very 1990s shojo, and has many of the expected traits of a CLAMP title. In many ways, it's exactly what one would expect.


What you have to remember, though, is there's nothing wrong with that. The reason that titles like Dragon Ball and Yotsuba&! come back again and again is that they are the comfort food of manga. You know what to expect when you start it, and it's a welcome break from titles like Attack on Titan and Berserk. CLAMP consistently delivers a certain level of excellence in each title they do, and Suki is no exception.


Highs: Hina getting excited about her favorite author's new book is a feeling we're all very familiar with.


Lows: The mystery around why she lives by herself is going to get old quickly.


Verdict: A traditional shojo romance that is very well done.


Further Reading: Bunny Drop, Yotsuba&!, Chi's Sweet Home

A sushi-loving werewolf must help two merfolk siblings recovered their embezzled money.

Gail Carriger takes a break from her Steampunk series with a slightly different take on the werewolf curse in 'Marine Biology.'

Alec never really expected to make it to 24. Born into a pack of werewolves, he was always considered a bit too...weak to make the change. In a family that looks like it just walked out of a biker bar, he swam instead of playing a more full-contact sport in high school, and is more likely to be spotted in a lab coat than a leather one. But family is family, and pack is pack, so when there's a get-together he shows up.

Even if he's more likely to bring a salad than a slab of beef.

This time, though, he's actually being given responsibility within the pack. There's been some funny business with the merpeople's finances, and a large chunk of money has gone missing. There's reason to believe that the selkies are in on it, and that's brought a brother-sister pair of mers to town. 

Giselle and Marvin used to be from around here, so they're the ones that were sent from the West Coast to figure out where the money's gone. Since they're not local anymore it's the pack's responsibility to keep them safe while they're investigating, and that's where Alec gets involved.

Nevermind that Marvin used to show up at Alec's swim practices to watch.

'Marine Biology' has an interesting premise and doesn't take itself too seriously. There's a ghost who lives at Butch's house and seems to take great pleasure in teasing the pack when it meets. Alec gets by in the aggressive pack politics by keeping his head down, but still gets made fun of for his sushi platters and job as a researcher. Even the merfolks seen a bit surprised with how badly he fits into this family. Nevertheless, this story has all the humor and clever dialog that readers of Carriger have come to expect, and is a welcome diversion.

Highs: Of course the Irish selkies would be the mafia of the water-weres.

Lows: I kept expecting the werewolf Biff to somehow tie into the character in the Parasol Protectorate with the same name.

Verdict: A quick, easy read that doesn't make itself out to be more than it is.

Further Reading: 'My Sister's Song', Soulless, Attachments

Do you believe in love before first sight?

As the internet took off, and more and more offices started letting their employees access it for their work, the more controlling of managers started to worry. How would they ever be able to keep their employees from going to 'illicit websites,' or spending all their time monitoring their Fantasy Football leagues? Especially in a workplace like a newsroom, where they can't effectively implement a web filter. So what is a company to do?

In Rainbow Rowell's Attachments, Lincoln O'Neill is the first line of defense against internet abuse for the newspaper he works for. Working overnights, he goes through a folder of all the emails that their security system flags as 'inappropriate' and decides whether to send a warning letter to the offender. Hardly what he expected when he signed up for a job in IT Security, but it pays well and isn't exactly a demanding job.

In between raunchy forwarded jokes and gossip about peoples' weekend plans, he stumbles upon the conversation chains between Beth Fremont and Jennifer Scribner-Snyder. Best friends and coworkers, Beth and Jennifer spend their afternoons at work gossiping about their lives via email. Beth is in a relationship that is stagnating with a guy who refuses to grow up, while Jennifer's husband keeps hinting about how cool babies are. Their personal lives play out via email, and every night Lincoln finds the latest installment in his flagged email folder.

By the time he remembers that he really ought to warn them about using the company email for personal use, it's far too late to send them a warning. He doesn't really want to anyway; these emails are the highlight of his night. He hasn't exactly been getting out much; he's moved back in with his mother after his latest round of university classes and his love life, as it were, stalled out the first year after high school. His sister means well, trying to get him to move out, join a gym, meet new people, but that's made even harder when you work nights.

And he just might be falling for Beth.

Whether she's writing about teens or adults, current day or the long-ago 1980s, Rainbow Rowell shows her understanding of people in a way that is hard to find. Through their highs and lows, Beth and Jennifer have a friendship that is special, and yet exactly what one would expect. They get wrapped up in their own lives and feel terrible when they forget to check in on the other. Lincoln loves his mother, and doesn't want to leave her in the house by herself, but part of him still wants to go off on his own. And everyone clings to the status quo, even when stepping out into the unknown might pay off in spades.

Highs: Seeing a chick-lit style book with a male main character is a rather interesting twist.

Lows: A few parts dragged, and perhaps Lincoln should have listened to his sister sooner, but that's minor.

Verdict: A must-read, especially for the older fans of her YA books.

Further Reading: Eleanor and Park, 'My Sister's Song', Landline

Victorian London isn't exactly tolerant of a girl with a temper

Miss Jayne has lost another position without a reference in this first story of The Steampunk Chronicles, Kady Cross' 'The Strange Case of Finley Jayne.'

It's hardly Finley's fault that she was fired. The governess Miss Clarke ought to have known better than to slap her charge hard enough to make him cry, just for taking an extra biscuit from the tea tray. There's no call for that, and in Jayne's estimation she deserved that punch to the mouth.

It's rather odd, though, that a maid her size would be able to swing hard enough to send her flying. 

And her teeth must have been in terrible condition for her to lose them so easily.

Finley wonders a bit about this terrible temper she's had of late. Normally a good-humored young lady, recently it's as if there's an invader in her own head. One minute she'll be as docile and calm as ever, and the next she's lashing out at someone, or not holding her tongue as she ought. Hardly a flaw that is acceptable in someone in her position.

Either way, whether it was because of her extraordinary strength, or her lack of control, she's been let off and now she gets to return to her mother and stepfather in disgrace. Again. She's fortunate enough that her parents have the resources to let her stay with them, but she still feels like a burden when she ought to be out working for her living.

Luckily, she's able to leave her parents' care very quickly. It turns out that yes, word of her ignoble departure from her last position has indeed made it into the gossip that swirls around London's upper-class households. While most would assume that a lady of the house would avoid such an unpredictable maid as Finley, there is in fact one Lady looking for someone just like her.

Lady Morton needs a companion for her youngest daughter. About the same age as Miss Jayne, her duties would essentially involve being the girl's shadow, following her to dances and out visiting and such. After being a maid, it's much less demanding work, and for much better pay as well. It turns out, Lady Morton appreciates that a maid would defend a child with no thought to her own position in the household.

It's a good thing that Miss Phoebe will have such a protective companion. Her father has made a match of convenience for her, as the man is willing to cover his many gambling debts and keep him funded in the future. Her betrothed is quite a bit older than her, and the more Phoebe's mother and Finley find out about him, the more uneasy they are about the whole situation.

Kady Cross sets the stage for her Steampunk Chronicles series with a novella introducing us to the heroine of the first full-length novel. Lots of threads are left unfinished, as these will be addressed later in the series, but the main story story concludes satisfyingly by the end. Cross shows that she can develop an interesting world with sympathetic characters, and leave readers wanting the next story.

Highs: Almost any reader can sympathize with wanting to let that voice making snarky comments out once in awhile.

Lows: None of the overarching questions of the universe or of our main character are answered here, which makes the story rather unsatisfying as a standalone.

Verdict: Well-written, if a bit thin main plot, perhaps better enjoyed after reading the first full-length story.

Further Reading: The Girl in the Steel Corset, God Save the Queen, A Study in Silks, Steam & Sorcery

Family isn't always about blood

A mother's love for her child sends her on a dangerous mission in Cindy Spencer Pape's 'Ashes and Alchemy.'

Note: Ashes & Alchemy is the sixth story of the Gaslight Chronicles series. While the stories work well as stand-alones, there are inherent spoilers, especially where the romances are involved.

Manga Monday: Let the wedding celebrations begin!

Laila and Leily finally begin their journeys with their new husbands in A Bride's Story Volume 5.

Note: A Bride's Story Volume 5 is part of an ongoing series. Check out the review for Volume 1 here, and Volume 4 here.  Otherwise, read on!

Remember when you had to work up the courage to hold a girl's hand?

Betrayal. Revenge. Sparkly vampires and emo witches. Recently, young adult romances have been very much like adult bodice-rippers, but with teenagers in high school instead of neglected housewives or lonely lasses on the Scottish Highland.

Rainbow Rowell's Eleanor and Park bucks this trend with the most realistic young adult romance in years.

Park is the son of an Army veteran and his Korean wife. They don't live in the best neighborhood but they get by. His mother sells Avon and takes pride in her house and her sons. His dad is hard on him, and tends to favor his more traditionally masculine brother, but is still involved in his life and does the best he knows how. He's hardly a popular kid, and Taekwondo isn't enough to make him sporty, but he has is place on the bus and headphones to block out most of the noise from his classmates.

For all that Park's family does the best with what they have, Eleanor's family is an all too common disaster. As the oldest child, she stilll remembers how it was when her parents were still together. She remembers her mother baking cookies and making Christmas dinners. She remembers the kids having their own rooms, not to mention their own beds.

She remembers a time before her stepfather Ritchie. Before being sent to their shared bedroom at 4:30pm. Before having her mother guard the bathroom without a door while she takes as quick a bath as possible. After a year's exile to the friend of the family's house, Eleanor is back with her mother and siblings, and is determined to make the best of it.

Like most relationships, it isn't love at first sight. In fact, it is nearly the exact opposite. Not hatred, but an almost complete indifference. But as Eleanor and Park share a bus seat, and English class, they both begin to thaw towards one another. In typical 1980s fashion it begins with mix tapes and comic books, and slowly it develops into one of the most truthful, honest relationships I've ever read.

High school is hard. Some people have money and charisma and it's not so bad for them. Some people don't, but a loving family can make up for a lot, and fore them it can be tolerated. Some kids go through hell; tortured at school because kids are cruel, and then go home each night to another kind of nightmare.

Sometimes, two kids from very different backgrounds find one another, and together pull each other through.

Highs: Everyone in this book, from the overenthusiastic teacher to to Park's mother, react in very authentic ways.

Lows: That said, Eleanor's siblings didn't always ring true to me.

Verdict: Eleanor and Park transports the reader to those days in high school when life was harder than it should be and you couldn't do anything about it.

Further Reading: Fangirl, Beautiful Creatures, Moribito

A small town with a big secret

Small towns everywhere have a few things in common. There's a group of overly-involved mothers who rule the town via a network of gossip. There's usually a relatively incompetent sheriff's department that gets lazy due to the lack of real crime to deal with. There's kids who will live out their whole lives there, and others who want to leave the day after they get their diplomas. Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl do a wonderful job at setting the scene of Gatlin, South Carolina in their novel Beautiful Creatures. 

Ethan Wate is one of the kids who can't wait to leave town. He has a map of all the locations in the books he's read that he wants to visit. He hides his books under his bed, Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, since even though is family is more progressive than some of the other families in town, it's still not expected that one of the stars of the basketball team would have a bookwormish bedroom. He's had a hard time of it recently, following the death of his mother, and with his father retreating more and more into his study to work on his 'Great American Novel,' he's been relying on Amma more and more for advice and love. Good old Amma, with the little wards she leaves around the house, and her wise advice mixed with cryptic phrases.

He's been having nightmares recently. In them, a girl is falling, and her fingers slip out of his hand. He can never quite make out her face, and he's sure that he doesn't know her, but he also knows that he loves this girl more than he can believe. He can never remember how the dreams ends, and even stranger, no matter how sure he is that he shut the window at night, it's always open when he wakes up.

On his first day of school, after yet another one of these strange dreams, he finds a new song on his ipod. 'Sixteen Moons.' He tries to show it to his best friend Link, but when he goes to pull it up again it's vanished. But there's news at school: there's a new girl. An actual girl, named Lena Duchannes, that they haven't known since they were babies. Big news in such a small town. And even stranger, she's the niece of the town recluse, and living in the house that everyone's convinced is haunted. Arriving at school in a hearse probably didn't help the rumors much, either.

Later in the day, he hears the strains of the dream song wafting up from the band room, but again the person playing it is gone by the time he gets there. 

Driving home from a freak thunderstorm, Ethan almost runs over a shadowy figure in the road. It turns out that the person in the road is Lena, and her hearse broke down. As Ethan gets a good look at the new girl, he realizes something: this is the girl that he's been dreaming about.

Beautiful Creatures takes the typical YA romance story and infuses magic. Lena is overprotected for a reason: this year, on her sixteenth birthday, she will be Claimed as either a Light or Dark magic user, with huge consequences either way. Ethan learns more than he ever thought he would about the men he was named after, and each of the 'Families' of Gatlin have more skeletons in their closets than an anatomy classroom.

There's quite a few storylines in this book, possibly because it is the first of a quartet. As such, at times the book drags terribly. At one point, Ethan and Lena's lives turn into "try to find information, can't find information, hang out some more." And while this is how life usually is, it didn't need to be shown to the reader. Also, perhaps because both authors are women, at times Ethan seems to be more of a female character skinned as a high school boy than an actual guy. Both he and Link are completely idealized teenage boys, without any of the crudeness that one expects.

Despite its flaws, Beautiful Creatures is an engaging Young Adult romance, with a well thought out magical system and side characters that fascinate even more than the main ones.

Highs: The Caster Library is every bibliophile's dream.

Lows: Naming a librarian Marian is just too spot-on-the-nose for me.

Verdict: At an intimidating 560 pages, Beautiful Creatures drags occasionally but is still a relatively quick, entertaining read.

Further Reading: A Discovery of Witches, A Shimmer of Angels, Dust Girl

A photographer's camera shows a bit more

A shadowy presence, and a string of deaths, may doom a young lady's portrait studio in Cindy Spencer Pape's second 'Gaslight Chronicles' story, 'Photographs and Phantoms.'

Note: 'Photographs and Phantoms' is the second story of the Gaslight Chronicles series. While the stories work well as stand-alones, there are inherent spoilers, especially where the romances are involved.

Steam, romance and the supernatural intertwined

Sir Merrick Hadrian's life is turned upside-down by five talented orphans - and the governess he hires to care for them - in Cindy Spencer Pape's first Gaslight Chronicles story "Steam & Sorcery."

It's hard to be a governess. Never mind the children; even when they're spoiled brats there's usually something to work with. No, Miss Caroline Bristol's problem has been with the master of the house. Specifically, when she (rather firmly) refuses their advances, she generally finds herself tossed out of the household. Thankfully Sir Hadrian, while certainly the most attractive of Miss Bristol's employers, seems completely oblivious to her.

Perhaps that's because Merrick has his hands full. Besides the fact that he found this group of street urchins while breaking up a den of Vampyres, there's some magickal-ness to them as well. The oldest is obviously a Knight, and the girl has a way with mechanicals that seems almost magickal as well. Out of an obligation to children of Knights, whether acknowledged or not, he takes young Thomas in, and along comes the rest.

But even the household of a lord isn't perfectly safe. In fact, in searching out the origins of the vampyres Merrick encountered, he and Caroline must seek out London's seedy underbelly. And with Jamie's visions warning them that death is in their future, it will take all of their talents combined to come out whole.

Cindy Spencer Pape creates a world rich with European traditions interwoven with a London that never was. Steampunk elements are little more than window dressing in this story, but even as such, they add to the rich descriptions of the era and the talents of the characters. Steam & Sorcery is one of the better 'Steampunk Romance' novels out there, written by someone who understands that the fantasy element and characters are at least as important as the more...steamy scenes.

Highs: It's wonderful how Pape starts out with generic character types (street urchins, attractive governess, Lord of the manor) and fleshes them out into characters that the reader really cares about

Lows: As much as I love Merrick and Caroline, I wish there was more to do with the kids

Verdict: A very well-written 'Steampunk Romance' that never quite falls into the traps of more poorly-written romances

Further Reading: 'Photographs and Phantoms', Soulless

It takes a village - or a circus - to raise a child

It's an old-fashioned Scottish witch-burning in Cindy Spencer Pape's 5th Gaslight Chronicles story, Cards and Caravans.

Note: Cards and Caravans is the fifth story of the Gaslight Chronicles series. While the stories work well as stand-alones, there are inherient spoilers, especially where the romances are involved.

Manga Monday: Why did Mr. Smith think he could sleep astride a camel?

Mr. Smith continues on his travels, and meets two special young ladies, in Kaoru Mori's A Bride's Story Volume 4.

Note:  A Bride's Story Volume 4 is, of course, the sequel to A Bride's Story Volume 3.  The review of A Bride's Story Volume 1 is here, and the review of A Bride's Story Volume 3 is here.  Otherwise, read on! 

Imagine the air quality if we still used coal in cities today!

The year is 1859 and the Crown has more to worry about than usual in Cindy Spencer Pape's fourth story of The Gaslight Chronicles, Moonlight & Mechanicals.

Note: Moonlight & Mechanicals is the fourth story of in The Gaslight Chronicles series.

An Indian pickpocket finds more than she bargained for

Esme and Jed are back, and just as hard-headed as ever in the second story of The Bustlepunk Chronicles, Courting Trouble by Jenny Schwartz.

Note: This is the second story of The Bustlepunk Chronicles. The review of the for the first story, 'Wanted: One Scoundrel' can be found here. Otherwise, read on!