White Night Melody, Vol. 1

By Selena Lin
Tokyopop, 192 pp.
Rating: Teen (13+)

Colleen and Jing Ping, a pair of old, very lively dolls, suddenly find themselves (through a run-in with a fishbowl and some magic marbles) human again. With their newfound power comes a whole new set of challenges, but no shelf life could ever have prepared them for the biggest battleground of all: modern day high school! Worse still, something decidedly sinister is going on, and it all seems related to their past—if only they could remember it.

As one might infer from my summary, White Night Melody is a mess. The confusion begins from page one with an almost assumed familiarity with the characters that will leave most readers convinced they’ve picked up a mislabeled volume two. The disparity is so startling that I was compelled to hit the internet in search of an answer—only to find that White Night Melody is the third part in an interlinked trilogy of series. Combined with sloppy character development overall, the plot quickly descends into a lackluster bag of clichés and ever-predictable flashbacks populated by people we’ve never met before, although Chinese readers apparently have.

Clunking around in the mess are the two protagonists themselves, little more than pasteboard stand-ins for the usual tropes. Might as well just know them as “dominant, protective male protagonist” and “clumsy damsel in distress,” since it’s a struggle just to hold on to their names. Toss in a half-hearted romantic rival for each, and you’ve got the makings of one of the poorest, blandest schoolyard romances print has ever seen. The tension is barely extant, the chemistry, nonexistent. To boot, there’s a Secret Past Mystery lurking around in here somewhere, but if who can focus it when every literary fiber of one’s being cries out in pain?

The art, at least, looks better in comparison to the trainwreck it conveys. Lin’s heroines are saucer-eyed, sparkly, and frequently surrounded by oodles of rosy screentones: it could almost be a parody of the genre itself. Perhaps accordingly, panels have a tendency to get overcrowded on a regular basis. Rich textures are fine, but the artistic claustrophobia they trigger is less than pleasing to the eye. Unexplainably, Tokyopop chose an almost doodle-esque piece of scrap art for the front cover, a questionable choice when even the panels look complex and masterful by comparison. Then again, maybe that’s the warning sign—a kind of literary aposematism, perhaps.

It’s impossible to recommend White Night Melody with a clear conscience. Perhaps if it arrived accompanied by its manhua brethren it might prove at least vaguely palatable, but the abysmal nature of the work suggests that when it comes to this trilogy, less may be more. If you have sufficiently depleted the manga reserves this country offers and are left with only White Night Melody, well…it may be time to consider picking up a good print book again.

Volume one of White Night Melody is available now.