Voices of Love

I just had to get me some LuvLuv.  I wanted to wait until “Love for Dessert” came out, because that sounded the most interesting, but I also sort of wanted to support the release of more of this sort of thing, and hey, who am I to turn down a good romance comic?

This volume is a series of short stories.  After I finished it, I realized that they were exactly the same sorts of stories you might find in a yaoi anthology, except the main character was female instead of male.  Make of that what you will.  I suppose the audience is, in theory, the same.

My favorite story was “Rainbow Smile,” which got a little Confidential Confessions-ish in that the female character was horribly abused by her boyfriend.  He doesn’t treat her well, she supports him totally (he lives in her apartment and doesn’t pay a dime for anything), and eventually he goes as far as throwing her out of her own apartment so he can cheat on her with another girl in her own bed.  He also beats the shit out of her.  She has a friend she vents to, and most of the story is the boyfriend getting worse and worse while the friend tells her to end the relationship.  I’m not sure why I liked it so much, it was kind of a gruesome story, but I think it was probably the most well-done in the volume.

Another good one was the title story, which was about a young teacher and her loud next-door neighbor, who turns out to be a student at her school.  You can imagine where this goes, particularly if you’ve ever read any yaoi anthologies.  In this volume, they sort of make it clear that the student is over 18 since he’s living by himself and doing all sorts of other adult things, unlike some yaoi volumes I can think of where the characters say they’re in college, but wearing high school uniforms.

Anyway.  What else was there?  Other stories were about a girl who had a “friends with benefits” relationship with a boy but wanted more, one is an older man/younger girl relationship (the girl is 18… I don’t think she’s in school anymore, but I could have stood a little more age, though the plot is hinged on the fact that she’s very childish and the guy is very fatherish), and one story is about a boy who tries to teach the campus sex toy what having a friend is like.

One thing that these stories all have in common is an explicit sex scene, usually at the end.  It kind of feels shoehorned in in some cases, but I think it’s sort of required.  They’re not hardcore or kinky or anything, but they are there.

It’s a decent collection of short stories, and it scratches my itch for smutty romance between adults.  The stories are mostly only so-so, but not the bad end of so-so, and after reading volume after volume of stories about kids in high school, something like this is a breath of fresh air.  I could definitely stand a lot more so-so volumes of relationships between adults.  I’ll definitely be picking up the rest of the LuvLuv books.