"Ai no Shintairiku"
(New Continent's Love)
by Nari YAMADA
ISBN# 4-08-847705-7
Margaret Comics, 2004

I actually had a vague idea of what this book was about before I bought it. Amazing, I know! So no, I didn't just buy it because of the cover this time! I saw a preview of a couple of pages and read a really badly mangled bablefish translation of a plot synopsis. Amazing that I managed to be interested enough in this after reading such a mangled summary! The art is very cute for a Margaret Comics series. Anyway, I really liked this story because it seemed very different from a typical shoujo (or even yaoi) series. This story is a yaoi one, sort of...


The 'heroine' of this story is actually a guy named Souhei. He is a very cute boy, but he has never really felt like a 'boy'. So when he has the chance to transfer into a new high school, he decides to do it as 'Sara' a girl (much to the chagrin of his mother). He wears a girl's school uniform and wears his long hair in a very cute fashion. He is finally going to be the real person he feels like inside. Things start off great for Sara. On the very first day of school she meets a really cute guy on the train. His name is Naruse-kun, and thanks to the close-quarters on the crowded train, he quickly realizes that the girl pressed against him is not exactly what she appears to be. Fortunately for Sara, she is placed in Naruse's class at school. Lucky! The class is rather shocked when their new male transfer student, 'Souhei-kun' looks like such a cute girl. But their teacher tells them that yes, Sara is a guy. The guys are crushed. However Naruse finds himself attracted to Sara regardless of her gender. Sara totally falls for Naruse too. Can they really become a couple? Sara must face a lot of pressure from her mother to conform to acting/dressing like a normal guy. And Naruse has to come to terms with the fact that he is attracted to another guy, no matter how cute and feminine 'she' is. A very unusual love story for Margaret Comics! :D

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