By Gong GooGoo
Published by Yen Press
Rating: Teen

When a landslide destroys Jae-Gyu Sin’s family home in rural Jeon-Nam province, her grandmother declares that it’s time the lazy twenty-year-old leave the family home and go live with her brother Hyung-Gyu Sin in Seoul. Jae-Gyu is given the equivalent of about $25 and sent on her way. After buying her bus tickets and subway fare, she arrives in the big city with less money than it would take to buy a soda. She manages to make it to her brother’s apartment, but that’s after she angers a handsome young man in a BMW by causing a ruckus over a dropped coin about the worth of a US dime.

I love Jae-Gyu. I really do. She’s loud, she’s violent, and she’s completely unprepared for adult life, much less adult life in the big city. When she enters her brother’s fancy apartment, she demands to know how he affords such a place on a student’s income. When she runs into the handsome stranger again in a store, she ends up yelling at him and (accidentally) pantsing him. It could be that I love her so much because she’s the type of character I usually feel myself drawn to, but I think there’s more than that. Her flaws are very realistic, and I’m a big fan of flawed characters.

Then there are the side characters. In the first volume, it looks like there’s truly something interesting going on with Hyung-Gyu. All we know about why he has his apartment is that he kicks his sister out early in the morning, only to have a beautiful woman show up minutes later and demand that he give her a glass of water and then take his clothes off. Oooh, he’s a rent boy! I thought, disappointed when the truth of the matter turns out to be much more mundane in volume two. Jae-Gyu’s best friend from childhood, Hyun-Ah Im, is also in Seoul. She’s been in the city since she was seventeen, and is much more worldly than the naive Jae-Gyu. It’s Hyun-Ah, in fact, who is key to the appearance of one of the male leads of the story.

Hee-Do Yoon was the kid that Jae-Gyu bullied when she was young. He was smaller and more delicate than she and her friends were, but he tried to tag along with them despite the fact that they wanted nothing to do with him. After Jae-Gyu is accidentally responsible for him breaking his arm, he transfers to another school and isn’t seen again. That is, until she arrives in Seoul and sees his face on a jumbotron. Seems that Hee-Do has become the lead singer of a boy band, and Jae-Gyu isn’t exactly happy to see his face again.

As for the handsome stranger that Jae-Gyu pantsed? His name is Whie-Hwan Jung. He’s the heir to a crime family, a man who doesn’t really seem to feel all that much. As a child, he was trained in Muay Thai boxing in Thailand. His instructor was probably the only adult who ever showed him any sort of affection whatsoever, but that only lasted until he was a teenager. He comes off as distant and dangerous, violent in a different way than Jae-Gyu. She might yell at someone or throw a punch, but he gives off menace. And then there’s the constant tail he has from his grandfather, and the proposition he makes to Jae-Gyu: he’ll pay her to live with him for a month and pretend to be his girlfriend. There’s nothing sexual about this, more scheming; he’s trying to get his grandfather off his case regarding an ex-girlfriend, and thinks this might work.

So it seems that the love triangle is set up. There’s the good boy and the bad boy. But which is which? I’m not entirely sure if I’m supposed to like Hee-Do, but I came away hating him. I don’t understand why he’s even interested in Jae-Gyu, since she never showed him a moment’s kindness when they were children, and his behavior toward her now that they’re adults is stalkerish and creepy. We’re shown a flashback where he goes back to the village in his late teens and watches Jae-Gyu goofing off in the green tea fields. He then contacts Hyun-Ah and gets her to text him should Jae-Gyu come to Seoul. He gets Hyun-Ah to trick Jae-Gyu into a surprise date, taking her out and then abandoning her so that Hee-Do can swoop in. She does this twice. Some friend she is! It’s incredibly disturbing—his obsession with this lazy ex-bully has him skipping out on concerts and putting his entertainment career in jeopardy. Whie-Hwan, on the other hand, seems dangerous at first only to then show vulnerability. He trusts this woman in his house. He trusts her to get him home when he’s injured after a fight with some of his grandfather’s thugs. She irritates him and says and does some really stupid things, but he still asks her to pretend to be his girlfriend. Which man is more dangerous?

The art of Sugarholic is fantastic. The lines are clear and clean, the screentones used don’t muddy up the art, and the artist’s sense of anatomy really impresses me. In particular, I like the way she draws feet. Weird, I know, but she really is good at it and these are people who often wear sandals.

Sugarholic is a series that has me wanting to know what’s next. While I’m worried that Hee-Do is intended to be gentlemanly rather than stalkery, I still want to see what’s coming. Will Whie-Hwan be able to shrug out from under the crime family? Will Hyun-Ah quit enabling that creep Hee-Do? Will Jae-Gyu ever get a clue? I have no idea. I can’t wait to find out.

Volume one of Sugarholic is available now. Volume two will be available in November 2009.

Review copies provided by the publisher.