Pretty Poison

I ordered this, then forgot I ordered it, and bought it in a fit of excitement when I saw it in a store one day.  I’ve NEVER seen a Luvluv book in a store before.  So now I own two copies of this, which is fine, because I like it better than any of the other Luvluv books so far.

Instead of the usual one-shots, this volume is mostly one continuous story about the same couple.  The girl is cheated on, then dumped, by her boyfriend, and a younger guy sweeps in for the rebound.  The younger guy and the old boyfriend are linked somehow, and the girl knows this and doesn’t want to get involved, but the young guy is persistent and just keeps showing up and sticking around.

Unfortunately, both the men in the story were grade-A creeps, and I wasn’t too sure why the girl let the younger guy stick around after she told him “no” so many times.  They had fairly rough sex together, including right after the boyfriend broke up with her and the girl cried all the way through.  The author mentions she wanted the story to be about the characters more than the sex though.  There are only a few sex scenes, and I’m glad she was thinking this way, because the characters seemed better because of it.  I think having the longer story helped too, only because you were drawn into the story a lot more in this volume than in the previous Luvluv stories.

I did get drawn into the romance, but the story itself had it silly moments.  The link between the younger guy and the old boyfriend was downright bizarre, and really did make both of them into the biggest jerks imaginable.  Plus, the younger guy has real shoujo manga family problems, but those are sort of secondary, and they bring the pair closer together in the end, so I didn’t mind so much.

There is a short story at the end, and I even liked this short story quite a bit more than the short stories from the past books in the line.  Instead of starting a relationship over from scratch, it focuses on a girl who has doubts about whether she can make a good wife for her boyfriend, who just proposed to her.  I actually wound up liking the female character in this story a lot, too.

Two thumbs up for this volume.  Again, it’s probably not for everyone, and the story isn’t really that deep, but anyone looking for a good romantic one-shot might want to give it a try.