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HEADPATS

This was great. Can't wait to read more. This couple is adorable and I just love the realistic quality of the characters. The art is well done too. ( )

Hori agrees to help out the student council, even though she's already overworked. She also starts to worry about the future – she can't even begin to imagine what she might do after high school, and it dawns on her that Miyamura might leave her life forever after graduation. Readers get a brief flashback to Miyamura's past, as he worries about whether he truly fits in with this new group of friends he's found himself. Near the end of the volume, Ishikawa hears something shocking and confronts Miyamura about it.

I needed to read something sweet and this fit the bill, although it wasn't quite as good as the first volume in the series. Hori and Miyamura were, as usual, completely adorable together. There were lots of hilarious moments – my favorite was the one involving poor Ishikawa's birthday present for Hori. For everyone's sake, I hope he gets over Hori soon.

The flashback to Miyamura's elementary school (and middle school?) years was one of the more interesting moments in the volume. I had been wondering about his reasons for getting piercings and tattoos that he rarely allowed anyone to see, and this part seemed to indicate that it possibly started off as a form of self-harm. Considering that he did his first piercing with a safety pin, some tissues, and nothing else, he's lucky he didn't die of an infection. In the series' present day, though, I think he just genuinely enjoys the tattoos and piercings, based off of his reaction when Hori's little brother suggested a new tattoo for him to get (it totally looks like something out of Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle, by the way).

This volume introduced a few new characters. I'm really not a fan of Remi, the student council president's girlfriend. She tries a little too hard to be cute, referring to herself in the third person (“Remi's in a hurryyy!”), and the bit later in the volume, when she needled Hori, was kind of odd. It would have made more sense for her to apologize for what she'd done to Hori earlier in the volume, and it felt like a clunky attempt, on the author's part, to move Hori and Miyamura's romance forward. That feeling was intensified when Ishikawa confronted Miyamura a short while later.

Like I said, I didn't think this volume was as good as the first one. However, I enjoyed it enough that I started reading (and finished!) the third volume before reviewing this one. I usually try to avoid doing that, because it becomes difficult to keep everything straight, but Hori and Miyamura were too sweet for me to want to stop.

That said, one last gripe: if I remember correctly, Hori's best friend saw Miyamura in his full pierced and tattooed glory in volume 1, and Hori lied and said he was her cousin. It seemed like this would be an important moment (and an important lie) in the near future, but it didn't come up again in this volume nor in volume 3 (and it really should have in volume 3, but more on that when I review that volume). Here's hoping that the author eventually does something with that detail.

Extras:

- One full-color illustration of Ishikawa and Yoshikawa (Hori's closest female friend).

- A 4-page manga-style announcement of the Hori-san and Miyamura-kun OVA (based on the work on which Horimiya is based), which I would now badly like to see.

- A 3-page bonus short in which Sengoku, the student council president, is revealed to be a little less cool than everybody but Hori thought.

- A 1-page manga-style afterword.

- One page of translation notes.

(Original review, including read-alikes and watch-alikes, posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.) ( )

The odd friendship continues to develop, inevitably provoking the odd rumour and some curiosity about shy, ignored Miyamura. The introduction of some friends to the story stops things from bogging down. ( )