Honey and Clover

This is an oddly enjoyable manga. It's very simple and basic, the drawings just plain, clean lines, But something addicts you to reading it. It's a fun manga, barely any deep feelings, But then, when there are, It's described so thoroughly and whole-heartedly it makes you cry. (unless it's something happy being described)it's hilarious too. I can't stop laughing when i read this. SPOILER (Sort of) there's this part where one of the main characters builds a tower thing for his grad project, and the teachers stand there and are like "it's good but.." so the guys friend takes a piece of wood and makes up aname for the tower and writes it in marker and props it up against the tower and then, suddenly the teachers are like" OMG this is amazing. It deserves an A, how the name looks so so thrown together, almost shabby makes it a masterpiece!!!!" :) so funny!

The first great work by the author of 3-gatsu no Lion, Honey and Clover is a triumph of slice of life and josei romance. If you are an artist yourself, or a fan of the mangaka's other stories, consider an investment in the entire series and purchase all ten volumes of "HoneyClo". It will be money and time well spent. The romantic relationships in Honey and Clover are every bit as messy as real life. And the most common complaint about the series is that there are too many stories. Most of the characters just don't get enough time or pages to bring their storiesto satisfactory conclusions. Ultimately the author focuses on our leads, Takemoto and Hagu, who meet at the art institute and become fast friends, supported by older students like Yamamoto and Mayama, and their big brother of a professor, Hanamoto Shuuji. By the end of our journey, most of our friends have found love, and the rest are confident that it is better to have loved and lost... Like young people falling in love, our mangaka doesn't get everything right. There are awkward subplots, and one or two plots too many. Like life itself, most of the story lines don't have neat and tidy endings. There will be tears and maybe outright sobbing at the end of the tale, and complaints that we did not have enough time with our friends. But there is the anime, and the live action drama, and there is always this manga, worth returning to whenever we need a little reunion party with our dear Hagu, and Takemoto, and Yamada, Nomiya, Leader... I miss you all.

tl;dr on bottom Honey and Clover is a manga that makes it really hard for me to pin down how I feel about it. It's a story packed full of love but no romance, is full of development yet things feel stagnant, and has characters that feel realistic but at the same time unbelievable. The story follows primarily a group of 6 residents in a small house at an art school. The manga as a whole is then split up to follow each of the six characters as they learn to deal with their own personal struggles of love, talent and purpose. It's honestly a littleconfusing because characters will leave and show up again a bit randomly as the story progresses to leave room to develop another main character, but it's understandable as to why the author did this. So many different themes are tackled in this one piece of art that it's difficult to take in without actually sitting down and thinking through it all. Half of the cast deals with talent or the lack thereof and the freedoms it can give or take away, a third of the cast deals with unrequited love and the consequences of striving for it, and one member must deal with the issues of the past and facing the future. Each one of these plots was very well done and gave more or less of a satisfying ending by the last chapter. The characters within the manga are also great. Each of them have their own dreams and aspirations, fears and doubts, all to the point where they feel very realistic. The web of relationships between the characters when they are alone or in a group are well fleshed out. Even the side characters are brimming with personality, with some becoming pseudo-main characters. Watching each character go on their own journey throughout the manga is definitely the highlight and the main focus of it all, and it is exciting to see where they finally end up. Now with all that being said, why is this not rated any higher? It's mostly due to some personal gripes I have with the manga, but you might find them to be not as important. The first issue I have is that the beginning is really slow. Now granted, with a character drama of this scale you have to provide the right setup in order to have a good final payout, but for me, I didn't start to get into the story until the halfway point. That's a pretty long setup if you ask me, so it took away from my enjoyment of the manga. Another issue is that I felt the manga took about half of its time developing the two least interesting characters while skimped out on developing the more interesting ones. I would have loved to see more of the Hanamoto or Morita, but they were only really used to bring out the development of other characters. And this is done wit most of the side characters. I feel like the backstories of many of the more minor characters would have made a more interesting story than the main ones, but were relegated to being stepping stones to help other characters grow. Hagumi also has a surprising lack of development for being not only a main character, but the driving factor in three other characters's stories. Overall though, this manga was one of the few that really made me think about what it had to say and what it meant to me. It had its fair share of flaws, but the things that it does well it really does well. It opens up questions for the reader to answer for their own lives: how will you live your life if you have outstanding talent or if you don't have any? How will you decide to live out your unrequited love, keep pushing or move on? How do you help those who are stuck in the past, push them forward or be there for them in the background? Definitely recommend if none of the gripes I had faze you at all tl;dr- great story about character growth, but you gotta keep up with the winding story and think about it a bit after you read. Also just gotta mention how similar this is to Sakurasou no Pet na Kanojo, from the setup to characters to major plot points, but this one is much better