By Lily Hoshino
Yen Press, 178 pp.
Rating: M

The Souda family has a strange, long-standing tradition: if the eldest son fathers a son as his firstborn, then the younger sons in the family must marry men in order to prevent conflicts over succession. With this ridiculous premise outlined on the first page, the series takes off as the short chapters chronicle the marriage and union of Shinji Souda and his bride Aoi, a classmate and member of a close family. There are short stories covering other members of the Souda family at other times, and a couple unrelated shorts thrown in for good measure, with a very brief epilogue about the original couple to wrap things up.

I went into this book with an open mind, since my experience with Lily Hoshino is 50/50 at this point. I liked her one-shot My Only King, but absolutely hated Chocolate Surprise, a short story collection. Unfortunately, this was a lot more of the latter book and less of the former. I thought some of my problems with Chocolate Surprise would be taken care of by the fact that there was a central couple to focus on, but for all the plot and character development they received, each chapter might as well have been different. The point of the volume is simply the sex scenes, which just don’t mean a whole lot to me if there is no romance to back up the action. And the sex scenes aren’t even good.

In the first chapter, we are introduced to the tradition that serves as the premise of the book, then Shinji’s friend at school, then we see that they will be married, then there’s the obligatory objection from Shinji, followed by tears from Aoi and an earnest admission from Shinji that he’s always secretly liked Aoi, and he simply objected because he was afraid he would love too much. This is about 20 pages. After the first couple abrupt shifts to the next mandatory plot point, any hope that the book would be good simply died. It was just… yaoi for yaoi’s sake. There’s a makeout scene in the first chapter, but the subsequent chapters (involving a “first night,” classmates finding out about their marriage, and objections from Shinji’s sister about their relationship) involve varying degrees of making out and sex, though nothing quite as graphic as we saw in Chocolate Surprise.

A later chapter focuses on a different Souda couple, featured later in the follow-up volume Mr. Flower Groom. Later, we meet a strange bodyguard/heir pair that had me completely stumped as to what was even going on when both adult-looking characters wind up at a high school together, attending class and dodging assassins. The bodyguard actually is twenty-four and just pretending. The final random story is… I can’t figure out if it’s a period piece or takes place in a sex club meant to resemble an old brothel, but involves a pair of lovers finally hooking up. I thought the employee at the club was a woman until the genitalia appeared during the sex scene. I probably should have known better, but Hoshino’s uke characters might as well be girls. None of these stories had any more plot or character development than the main couple.

It wasn’t enjoyable, and not even good as a yaoi book, really. Hoshino must have her fans, given how many of her series have been released here, and I think one of the draws might be her artwork, but I can’t imagine this is one of her better works.

Mr. Flower Bride is available now.

Review copy provided by the publisher.