Reviews: My Heavenly Hockey Club, Vol. 1; Sorcerers & Secretaries, Vol. 2

My Heavenly Hockey Club, Vol. 1

By Ai Morinaga
Del Rey, 206 pp.

My Heavenly Hockey Club is… wait for it… a slapstick comedy. (Thank you. I’ll be here through next week.) Actually, it’s a screwball romance about Hana and Izumi, a pair of opposites who meet cute through their high school’s field hockey team. Hana is a brash, crude, and lazy teenager who hordes her free time to pursue her two favorite activities, eating and sleeping. Izumi is a rich himbo who’s the apple of every girl’s eye–every girl, that is, except Hana. After his chauffeur hits Hana with his car (don’t ask… the set-up is even more nonsensical and hastily executed than your typical shojo rom-com), Izumi invites her to join the Grand Hockey Club, an offer that Hana declines–those early morning practices will interfere with her sleep schedule. Izumi then pulls out his trump card: if Hana joins the team, they’ll have enough players for away games at exotic destinations. The promise of gyűtan and four-star accommodations persuades Hana to become their goalie. But the Grand Hockey Club still has several hurdles to clear, not the least of which is their sheer lack of skill. Imagine a remake of The Bad News Bears starring the cast of Ouran High School Host Club, and you get the gist of the story: bumbling bishonen band together under the leadership of a tough-talking girl to take on more accomplished adversaries. Too bad their opponents always seem to cancel at the last minute.

As Your and My Secret demonstrated, Ai Morinaga loves to swap gender roles, assigning traditionally masculine traits to her female leads and vice versa. (Izumi, for example, conforms to the shojo heroine stereotype, right down to his relentless optimism and ditzy demeanor.) That gender-bending premise worked beautifully in Your and My Secret, but in Hockey Club it yields fewer laughs, largely because Izumi and Hana don’t complement (or complete) one another; they’re simply thrown together for the sake of the plot. Their high-decibel histrionics are offset by a supporting cast of colorful (if two-dimensional) characters and a love-sick bear. The antics never quite rise to the sheer lunacy of Secret’s best pages, but I got several good belly laughs at the bear’s expense.

Volume one includes a helpful appendix prepared by the translator as well as a generous preview of volume two. I don’t know if I have the patience for ten or twelve volumes of Hockey Club, but I’ll certainly stick around as long as the bear does.

Volume one of My Heavenly Hockey Club is available now; volume two arrives in stores in August.

Sorcerers & Secretaries, Vol. 2

By Amy Kim Ganter
Tokyopop, 192 pp.

Sorcerers & Secretaries offers something for everyone: a smart, plucky heroine who’s one part Jo March, one part Felicity; a clever, genre-bending story; a dash of romance, comedy, and fantasy; and a playful visual style that suits the material perfectly. The story centers on Nicole Hayes, a college student who divides her time between business school and menial office work. Whenever she has a spare moment, Nicole fills her journals with an elaborate, Tolkein-esque story about a wizard who’s been betrayed by his familiar. As the subject of her story suggests, Nicole feels conflicted about almost everything in her life, from school—she’s majoring in business at her mother’s insistence—to dating—she’s wary of wanna-be ladies man Josh Kim. Writing is the one thing that truly matters to her. When her feelings for Josh begin to interfere with her ability to write, she faces a dilemma: should she pursue happiness by dating Josh or by completing her magnum opus?

Sorcerers & Secretaries could easily devolve into My Brilliant Career II, but Ganter pulls off the difficult balancing act between respecting her characters’ motivations and recognizing the youthful naivete of their beliefs. She treats Josh and Nicole’s relationship with honesty and humor, capturing the special intensity of a romance’s early stages without being overwrought or sappy. On a more personal level, I was pleased to see an interracial romance that was presented in a matter-of-fact way, with no angry parents yelling about “finding a nice white/Korean boy/girl” or friends pressuring the couple to “stick with his/her own kind.” (And kudos to Ms. Ganter for creating an Asian American male lead with sex appeal—they’re as rare as ivory-billed woodpeckers.)

Where the book falters is in the introduction of a subplot involving two supporting characters: William, Josh’s roommate, and Susan, Nicole’s co-worker. William and Susan, like Josh and Nicole, engage in an awkward courtship. But unlike Josh and Nicole’s relationship, William and Susan’s plays like a sitcom. William—a self-proclaimed expert on dating and an avowed bachelor—tries to dump Susan—a boy-crazy twit—after a few dates, but Susan wears him down by refusing to acknowledge his rejection. Nothing about the way they relate to each other has a whiff of plausibility about it; William and Susan serve primarily as foils for Josh and Nicole, reminding us of the main characters’ essential decency and sincerity. Given the skill with which Ganter has rendered Josh and Nicole, however, these second bananas could have been omitted to allow other aspects of the story—such as Nicole’s relationship with her mother—fuller treatment.

Though the William-Susan subplot detracts from volume two, there’s still much to like about Sorcerers & Secretaries, from the smartly drawn characters to the deft way in which Ganter draws parallels between Nicole’s fantasy world and her day-to-day struggles. I enjoyed both volumes of this all-too-brief series, and hope to see more of Ganter’s work in the near future.

This review is based on a complimentary copy provided by the publisher. Volume 1 of Sorcerers & Secretaries is available now; the second and final volume will be released on June 12th. Click here to read a sample.