Manga - Ouran High School Host Club

I try to read manga when I can because usually the artwork is beautiful. One fantastic feature of manga are the sidebars written by the authors - they're like a mini-blog, so you get snippets of information about the books and the writers themselves. In this section, I'm going to show some of my favourites when I can.



Ouran High School Host Club
Bisco Hatori

From the blurb: In this screwball romantic comedy, a poor girl at a rich school ends up working for the school's swankiest club - and gets mistaken for a boy! 
One day, Haruhi, a scholarship student at exclusive Ouran High School, breaks an $80,000 vase that belongs to the "Host Club", a mysterious campus group consisting of six super-rich (and gorgeous) guys. To pay back the damages, she is forced to work for the club, and it's there she discovers just how wealthy the members are and how different the rich are from everyone else. 


This is a cute, funny manga aimed mostly at girls - a self-proclaimed 'rom-com'. It's hilarious, and regularly finds me laughing out loud. It's fanciful and often ridiculous, and never takes itself too seriously. More recently though (17 of the 18 volumes have been published) it's been getting deeper. There's been a lot of character development and it's probed issues of identity, family and duty. The biggest theme is familial bonds; which is more important, family or friends, and how far should you go to please your relatives? 


Rarely does a book make me cry, but Host Club has managed it. Haruhi is such an independent, fascinating heroine. She barely notices the difference between genders and doesn't enforce stereotypes, and barely acknowledges her emotions. So when she discovers she's fallen slowly in love with one of the boys in the host club (no spoilers!) and can't be with him, it breaks my heart to see her eventually fall apart - she's so strong for so long that seeing her upset is horrible. 


The other characters are fantastic, too. There's charismatic Tamaki who is positive to the point of annoying. Threatening Kyoya is dark and a genius, with unreadable motives. Hikaru and Kaoru are twins with a desperate need to be seen as one entity but two identities, on an endless quest for fun. Hunny is almost painfully adorable, a boy who loves anything cute but is surprisingly mature. And then there's Mori, who's so quiet you can almost forget he's in a scene, but he's chivalrous and kind, with amazing insight into other people. 


Overall, this series is beautiful. I can hardly wait for the next book - but I don't want to read it, because it's the last one!


Ouran High School Host Club volume 18 comes out at the end of June 2012.