Reviews

i kinda go back and forth on this manga's quality. as you read in the synopsis, it's about a girl who dresses like a boy and the various shenanigans this causes for her and others. while it's accurate, it's almost a bit lacking. it seems strange to say this, but i'd call this manga rather shakespearean in its story telling. not in the sense of "eminently quotable and legendary piece of art", but in the sense of "this story runs solely on misunderstandings which compound themselves into increasingly worse situations because the characters are incapable of being honest". like romeo and juliet, hamlet, or many other of his works, the main narrative thrust of a lot of shakespearean plays involved a failure (whether intentionally or unintentionally) to communicate. like those plays, bokuhime uses these misunderstandings as fodder for both comedy and drama.

the reason i related this to shakespeare was because of similar feelings i had while reading both works. my main feeling, to put it bluntly, was frustration. so much of the drama could have been prevented with honesty, and i feel like the social aftermath of shindou's gender confession could've even been as (if not more) interesting than the story we actually got. many times i was almost yelling at the characters to finally be honest about who they were and/or what they were thinking, because the moments where they did so were easily the most interesting. however, those were too few and far between.

although i spent a lot of time dumping on this manga, i will say that i didn't hate reading it. the comedy was pretty decent, the art was fine, and the characters were generally entertaining. i don't know that i would read through it again, but if you're bored and just want to read a silly manga about a crossdressing girl, you could do a whole lot worse.