Reviews

Drowning Love starts with a bang, maybe my favorite first chapter of any series I’ll read this coming year. Within chapter 1, Natsume (the MC) has been well introduced and intrigue surrounds her budding relationship with Kou (the secondary male MC). Early on, it doesn’t take long for additional aspects to be developed that make things more satisfying and gripping to follow. Natsume and Kou’s relationship, no matter how it changes, is very turbulent throughout the series. Their relationship and curiosity around one another explores a wide range, from negative motivations, to genuine desires for connection and acknowledgement, to uncertainty and assumptions leading to unintended consequences that spiral out control and explode outward impacting others - all of this creates a tension that just sucks you in. Even if how things ultimately concluded was rocky for me, the journey itself was well worth the read and I can’t wait to revisit this series with a greater depth.

While the relationship between Natsume and Kou takes center stage and is the most complex within the series, generally speaking the cast of characters, which is fairly small, have interesting dynamics that shift as the characters age, develop, and devolve. The progression of time was paramount to why I enjoyed this series as much as I did. Seeing the characters’ change over time as, with age, new experiences, feelings, emotions, and desires all led to alterations in their physical presentation, social circles, and goals which fed back into further fleshing out the cast and making them all worthwhile in following. It was so successfully pulled off that I didn’t mind the nebulous love line, evolving into a love triangle, before completely imploding into some nebulous shape as characters’ attractions, romances, and physical relationships with another constantly shifted in positive (and mostly) negative ways. Overall it creates a lot of intense suspense and drama which was, for the most part, very satisfying to be enmeshed in.

As for negatives, there are some moments when things feel a bit dragged out. I will lay some of the blame on how I read the series, starting out at a steady pace before binging the last 10 volumes over the course of two days. While it felt great in the moment, I do think that made certain developments feel more redundant than if I had paced myself throughout the entirety of the read.

Additionally, as mentioned earlier, the last two or so volumes were definitely weaker in their plot progression, character actions, and ultimately how everything concluded. While I wasn’t expecting the ending I wanted to come to fruition, and don’t think the actual ending is bad per se, the last four volumes did leave me wishing things didn’t feel so repetitive, and in a lesser capacity, to what came before.

Overall, this has been one of my favorite Asakura series (only Dance Dance Danseur is in contention with it) and one of my favorite shoujo series in general. It’s something I can easily imagine revisiting and dissecting to appreciate to an even greater degree. I have no doubt when I’m looking back on this year, this will have been one of my favorite reads.