Gug's House

TOP 23 SHOUJO ROMANCE MANGA

23. SWITCH GIRL
This series is about a girl who is a model student at school, but acts like a completely different person at home.  Wouldn't you know it, she meets a boy who acts like a geek at school to hide the fact that he is actually some kind of handsome hunk.  Also:  features cool tips on grocery shopping and unwanted-hair removal.

22. SENGOKU DANSHI HANA NO RAN
A girl that helps out at an agency for male models gets dumped by her model boyfriend.  Luckily, her grandfather has made a time machine and accidentally brought Oda Nobunaga and some of his handsome bodyguards back from the Sengoku period!  (Don't tell East Asian Studies scholars I said this, but Oda Nobunaga is kind of like Japan's Abraham Lincoln.)


21. WATASHI NI XX SHINASAI
This is a story about a girl who is cellphone novelist, which is where people write novels that they release chapter by chapter that people read on their cellphones.  Why don't we have that here?  Anyway, she wants to write about love, but she has no experience.  Luckily, she's able to blackmail the most popular boy in school into doing things.  Hey, I wonder if she'll fall in love with him.

20. KYUUKYOKU VENUS
This is just the typical story where a girl's parents are dead and she's taken to her grandmother's to discover that her grandmother is a rich CEO with a ton of handsome menservants.  And then later she's given a choice of three fiances, etc.  But the characters are likable enough that it stands out from the crowd.




19. HAJIMARI NO NIINA
Everyone loves a story about an 11 year old girl who remembers her past life where she was her school's nutritionist's girlfriend!  You want to read it right now, I bet!  Later she's in high school and her teacher is her past self's little brother????



18. FETISH BERRY
This is the story of Hiyori, a girl who fetishizes all kinds of different things about boys, whether it's perfect hands, or voice, or whatever, and then finds a boy who is perfect in every way except he blackmails her after he wakes up right when she is about to bite his hand!  Isn't that just the worst when that happens!?  She also has a nice childhood friend that has a crush on her, and later befriends a girl who's really into Boy Love.  (There's a similarly-themed shonen manga by the guy who wrote Midori no Hib, the one about the guy who wakes up one day to discover a tiny girl is at the end of his wrist where his hand should be.)


17. SHITSUREN NO SUSUME
This one's about a girl whose boyfriend dumps her and then she joins a club with the prettiest girl and most handsomest boy in school, where she realizes she was a bad girlfriend.  Then she falls in love with more guys before she gets to know them, and it doesn't work out.


16. KIMI NO SEI
This one's theme is the consequences of childhood bullying?  It's about a girl who was traumatized as a child by bullying started by her classmate.  She goes out on group date with friends and meets that very classmate, who falls in love with her.  There's also this epilogue about her teacher and this other student in her class that wasn't that great, but the main story is pretty good.

15. HOT GIMMICK
This was my first shoujo romance manga.  Aside from Clamp's Clover, which I didn't really get in to.  It's pretty much a teen soap opera that takes place in an apartment complex where all the residents work for one company, which I don't think is thing here in the U.S.  It's about a girl named Hatsumi whose romantic options are 1) the boss's son who is blackmailing her into being his slave, 2) a male model who tries to set her up to get raped to get to her father, and 3) her brother that she doesn't know isn't really her brother.  I'm reading another manga by this author and it's about an English teacher who agrees to marry a monk after he locks her in a room all night.  I'm kind of worried about the author.  But there's a side story about Hatsumi's little sister and her geeky friend falling in a more healthy kind of love that is still tops after all these years.




14. ZETTAI HEIWA DAISAKUSEN
This is a great one I read one week when I was sick with the diarrheas.  It's about the princess of one of two bordering nations that have been at war for a long time.  She and the prince from the other country agree to marry in hopes of ending the war.  But they don't like each other at all!  Oh no!


13. TARANTA RANTA
The story of this one revolves around a girl whose brother just died.  She meets a boy at her new school who looks just like her dead brother, but he's a real turd to her.  Her childhood friend Masato really steals the show, though.



12. TORIKAGOSHOU NO KYOU MO NETAI JUUNINTACHI
This is the story of a high school girl that goes around at night with a group of girls trying to flirt with middle-aged men and steal their money.  Actually, it's only about that at the beginning because she falls out with the group after they make her help beat up another girl.  You know how it is.  Anyway, she's offered a job modeling for a handsome painter by the handsome painter's handsome cross-dressing brother.  This one just ended recently, so I can say for sure the whole thing's good.

11. MASHIKAKU ROCK
I've only started this one, but the main character is just so lovable.  Her father was a musician, and he told her not to be like him when he died.  But she wants to play guitar and two fetching young gents want her to play in their band!  Oh dear!


10. 3 AM LAWLESS ZONE
This one's about a woman who works as a designer for a pachinko company.  If you don't know what pachinko is, you are so dumb.  (Remember the episode of Power Rangers where Lord Zedd cursed a pachinko machine so Rocky would get addicted to pachinko?  See?  You were so dumb for not knowing.)  She hates it there because they overwork her and her dream is to be an illustrator.  But who knows?  Maybe some friendly guy in a kangol hat works in the same building.  This is a great story about slowly becoming part of the dreaded workforce against all your wishes.


9. ATASHI NO BANBI
This one is about a girl who struggled as a student, but after a lot of hard work, made it into an elite high school.  One day she meets a delinquent on the train who happens to be a student in her class that always skips.  (He always skips school, that is.)  He starts coming to school again and they fight all the time BUT MAYBE IT'S TRUE LOVE, OKAY?







8. HIBI CHOUCHOU
This is about a girl who doesn't talk anymore because of negative experiences in school stemming from her being pretty.  She falls in love with a boy who can't talk to girls!  Teeheehee!

7. TSUBASA: RESERVOIR CHRONICLE

I've only got about 15 volumes of this one, some of which are doubles (whatever bookstore Grandma Eunice does her Christmas shopping at has some kind of malicious manga salesman), but someday I will finish it.  It's kind of a best-of-all worlds manga, as it involves jumping to different universes (featuring tons of Clamp characters, which I can't stress the wonderfulness of enough).  There's magic, sci-fi, the aforementioned crossovers, a ton more action than anything else on this list so far, and in case you didn't know, the main characters are another universe's Sakura and Syaoran (from Card Captor Sakura, of course) which is more than I ever asked for.


6. HIYOKOI
This series is about a tiny shy girl also named Hiyori who returns to school after missing a year because of cycling accident and falls in love with the outgoing tall boy the next seat over.  Every character in this series is adorable.  I especially like the homeroom teacher's extra stories about her past romances.

5. KURAGEHIME
This is another one of the few ones that isn't a high school romance, but it would stick out anywhere.  The title translates to Jellyfish Princess.  It's about a bunch of women who live together because they're all obsessed with different nerdy things (Chinese history, dolls, jellyfish, choochoo trains, etc).  They team up with the illegitimate son of a rich politician to try and save the building they live in from getting torn down by starting a designer label.  A lot of great characters and storytelling in this one.

4. HONEY AND CLOVER
This is the only one on this list I haven't read at all yet, but I watched the anime series based on it, and I've read other work by the author, and she's one of my favorites (The other series isn't really a romance, although Honey and Clover is probably more a coming-of-age story than a romance, too...).  It is definitely very good.  This is the only manga on this list that's told from a boy's perspective.  Buy this manga for me for Christmas!

3. PIKA ICHI
I just discovered this one, and it is spectacular.  It's about two dweebs who love yakuza movies and their school's motto, but they find out their school is awful, so they turn themselves into yankees ("yankee" is this great Japanese word for "delinquent") and just start beating up all the honors students.  Also they fall in looooooooooove!




2. AO HARU RIDE
This manga's about a girl who was bullied in junior high by other girls starting high school and reuniting with her childhood crush.  But he isn't at all like the boy she remembers, so that's a problem.  Eventually it's about her group of friends doing high school stuff.  It's got a really good style.


1. TAIYOU NO IE
This one is about a girl and her childhood friend's older brother whose parents died.  After her father remarries and her stepmother and stepbrother move in, she feels like she has no place in her house anymore and she runs away and he takes her in as a family member because he's lonely since his brother and sister were adopted by other family members somewhere else.  She's also another cell phone novelist.  Anyway, her dad doesn't seem to care, which is odd, but, you know, dads...  It's about them living together as family. Maybe she wants to be more than family, though.  And maybe his little brother moves back in, too?  Maybe friends and coworkers have crushes of their own?  What fun!

Labels: AV CLUB, MORE LISTS, SHOUJO ROMANCE