Manhattan
Love StoryAuthor: Momoko Tenzen
June/Digital Manga Publishing
200 pages
Diamond leads a pretty typical life in Manhattan - New York's city of love. He is an attractive florist, and has an equally good-looking lover, Locke, who is the influential head of a large Manhattan corporation. Unfortunately, Locke is constantly consumed by his work, but his love for Diamond remains an undying flame. Can this love stand the test of an over-zealous, workaholic boyfriend? (Source: Goodreads)
I
always get nervous when a manga-ka tackles an iconic American city as
the basis of their book. Not that I don't trust them to get the vibe
and energy of the place but damn do their American names get
ridiculous. And let's be real - names like Lock and Diamond are
ridiculous.
But I can forgive Momoko Tenzen for thumbing through a
Japanese to English dictionary for main character names because they
are just so darn adorable. There is drama, yes, but it is heavily
tempered by the power of cute.
As
usual, Tenzen is superb at bringing couples together. There are
multiple couples in this volume but the main one is Diamond and Lock,
and for me they are the most interesting. A florist and his CEO boss?
Yes please. I am one hundred percent here for that power dynamic, and
Tenzen manages to wrangle in all the awkwardness of it without making
it uneven (although Diamond does have an upper hand in arranging
dates, considering his pay level).
Still,
they are pretty adorable together even when they're figuring out
their lives. I also liked that one of them - mild spoiler alert! - is
revealed to have had a past relationship and still has, um,
remainders
from said relationship. It's been a while since I read a yaoi manga
that not only acknowledged that people have past relationships but
that sexuality is a fluid, ever changing thing and our position on
the Kinsey scale isn't a constant immobile thing. Also, I bet that
he's an absolutely adorable father figure.
The
only chapter I did not
like involved Mister Austin and Raphael, the cherub-faced nephew of
Japanese exchange student Kenji, who is dating Lock's co-worker
(phew, that's a tangled web to unweave!). It is shota. There is no
way around it. And you cannot look me in the eye and tell me either Raphael
or the kid Austin is banging are legal age; they barely look old
enough for middle school! Luckily, it only lasts for one chapter; the
other couples - who are
legal age - get far more page coverage in this book.
That
chapter above is really the only dark spot in Manhattan Love Story.
The rest of the volume carries Momoko Tenzen's usual mixture of
romantic drama and rom-com humor with enough sex to make the ink
sizzle off the page. I would not say it is her best work so far, but
it's pretty darn good otherwise. I could have done without the shota
and some of the more contrived plot twists for drama's sake.
Recommended - with one age-related caveat - for any yaoi manga fan.
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