Specs
Reviews
(3.89/5)GL High-School Idol story
Tags: LGBT, Idol, Slice of Life
After Haru, a girl training to become an idol who struggles with emotions, bombs her school audition in the 'expression' category, she’s told to go outside and actually experience the world to make her performance better. She goes to the cinema where she meets Rei, a girl who cries beautifully and sincerely at the film, the complete opposite of Haru. It goes pretty much exactly where you'd expect after that.
There's a bit of poetic language, but it never goes on for too long - it almost feels as though the author cut the poetics down to the bare minimum to get their point across quickly.
Overall I really enjoyed this. They become friends and catch feelings for each other pretty quickly, but for a book of this length it's expected. I don't read much romance to have much to compare it to but a few parts made me really emotional. I'd recommend it to anyone who likes idol and queer themes. Here's one of my favourite lines from near the end of the book that kind of sums its theme up - 心が震えたことのない人間には、誰かの心を震わせることはできない。
- There were no furigana for the names (at least in my kindle copy)
- Some outdated kanji used.
A Fun Idol Romance Story
The story is about a girl who has basically been training to be an idol her entire life. In one of the preliminary auditions she takes, she passes with extremely high marks in almost every category but scores a 0 in the expression category. The final audition isn't until months later and she is basically told to experience life before then in order to express true emotion and not just try to imitate others.
While the main "plot" point of the story is about the MC wanting to pass the final audition, the real focus is on romance. So I wouldn't recommend coming into the story expecting a ton of focus on idol activities or anything like that. It is mainly about two girls getting to know each other and falling in love.
With all of that said, I did really enjoy the story. The story is pretty short (about 46k characters long) so a lot of events progress fast and mostly how you'd expect them to. The characters are endearing though and I liked the MC's development. I do wish the story was a bit longer and more fleshed out but with it being on the shorter side, at least nothing ever dragged on.
The writing wasn't too difficult. There was the occasional long run-on sentence that gave me trouble but those weren't frequent. There's some entertainment business vocab mixed in and a little bit of flowery language when describing things. The dialogue in the book was pretty straight forward. I had the easiest time reading the dialogue heavy chapters vs the narration heavy ones.
There was no furigana for any proper nouns in the story so I just checked jisho for the name readings and hoped they were right.
Unrelated to the difficulty but one of the main characters in the story almost always ended her dialogue with an exclamation mark. Random but I thought it was funny.