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Little Darling (Yaoi Novel) | 
| Authors: Matsuri Kouzuki, Naduki Koujima
Publisher: Digital Manga Publishing
List Price: $8.95
Buy New: $4.57
You Save: $4.38 (49%)
Rating:  3 reviews
Sales Rank: 503860
Media: Paperback
Pages: 250
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 6.6 x 4.3 x 0.9
ISBN: 1569707693
Dewey Decimal Number: 741.5952
EAN: 9781569707692
ASIN: 1569707693
Publication Date: December 9, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Brand New! Save 30 - 50% off of retail prices on our wide selection of comic book graphic novels, manga and anime, role playing games, DVDS, Osprey military history books, and more!
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Miyori finds himself stuck with the job of finding all the angels' children who have become lost in the human world. When Miyori stumbles on a child named Daishichi, he realizes that the child is actually the heir to the throne of the heavens. But as soon as they meet, Daishichi proposes to him! Miyori wishes to someday become a real human man and has no intention of becoming someone's bride! But when he sees the stunningly handsome adult form that Daishichi takes when the sun goes down, Miyori's heart begins to quiver...
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| Customer Reviews:
 First DMP Novel Localization I Would Recommend Taking a Pass on June 1, 2008
T. LaPonte (Connecticut)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The story isn't terrible, and the localization isn't nearly as horrendous as some of DMP's earlier novel releases, but in general you could pass this one over and not be missing anything.
One word can pretty much sum up the entirety of this book: boring. Even the fantastic Kelly Quine's (of Ai no Kusabi) translation can't salvage the mediocre nature of the story itself. The translation is a bit bland in places, but it seems the original Japanese script was relatively repetitive with descriptives, like Kaie's insistence that he would become a "fantastic specimen of a man" one day, over and over again, all the way through the book (until it happens). It's also supposed to be a "comedy," but unless the translation stripped all the comedic writing style out of it, it was a failure plotwise to make me laugh even once.
Basically, there is no character development; there's barely any actual plot. Instead, the backdrop of Angels and Demons working in harmony to ensure the balance of good and evil of the human race is stated without any real interest in masking the exposition as anything but, and is generally underdeveloped and unexplored to its full potential. No one grows as a person. The changes, particularly in Kaie's romantic interest in Daina, are abrupt: stated as having happened, but scarcely shown in development. Instead, twenty years of plot are plowed through as if in the process of some great race to the finish, as if Kaie's permanent gender assignment were the entire goal of the story, instead of focusing on the actual love story.
And the characters are unlikable. Daina is just plain creepy, and if we are expected to root for him forcing Kaie to be his "only wife" and killing off his father's other wives because he opposes polygamy (oh, and they sent someone to kill him, but that was a matter of paying the assassin more money to take care of) so matter-of-factly, I can only scoff. Kaie in the same vein is a whiner, who's only redeeming quality is that he spends most of the book being pushed around about being a hermaphrodite (maybe that's where the comedy is supposed to be?).
The love interest between the two is completely unbelievable. Daina claims love at first site, but what kind of little creep forces a hermaphrodite, who wishes to become a man when he gets to choose his permanant gender at the age of 300 (20 years from the beginning of the book), into becoming his one and only queen? And what in the world posesses Kaie to accept? Not only does he claim to hate kids, which Daina has the appearance of during the day (and at night he is a gorgeous man, as per yaoi cliche rules), but Daina basically threatens him into it. And we're expected to just accept that he comes to "love" Daina? If they had actually bothered to explore Daina's insecurities about Kaie's sole interest in the "adult form" Daina, the story may have actually been pretty interesting. I would have loved a book that spend the core center of the plot development dealing with Kaie coming to terms with his real feelings, rather than having a rush of timeline crammed down my throat so I could get to 20 years later and we could see the gender assignment occur.
And there aren't even any love scenes either. There is a lot of talk of lovemaking, and some foreplay, but no details of the actual act. We're told how passionately Daina and Kaie are attracted to each other physically, and when Kaie is close to his transformation into a complete man (of course) and he's a total nympho, we get to "know" that they eventually go at it for nearly 10 days straight. We don't get to experience any of that. One would have thought that a story as otherwise bland as this one is would at least give us a lot of steamy love scenes for fanservice, but alas, there is nothing to break up the monotony.
Naduki Koujima, of Our Kingdom, does the illustrations, and they aren't terrible, but given the relatively uninteresting nature of the rest of the book, they don't exactly draw you in, either.
In all, I wouldn't recommend dropping your hard-earned cash on this title. DMP has many other better BL and yaoi novels to choose from. Matsuri Kouzuki tried to put together a fantasy BL story, rare in a genre generally dominated instead by sci-fi and cliche school or workplace romances, but this offering is a miss. If you want to borrow it from someone, or flip through it in the store, it might be good for a distraction, but not a keeper.
 A good read March 17, 2008
M. S. Born (Maplewood, Minnesota United States)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
A little short on the plot outside the two boys relationship, it's not a bad read. Their love at first sight is a little blah, but I like how they fawned over each other and the different complications their relationship has. Over all, not a bad read.
I'm not sure what to say about this one... January 12, 2008
Yamato (MN)
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
I've read about every June Yaoi novel that they've put on the market now, and unfortunately, not all of them live up to some of the awesome yaoi manga the same publishers have put out. Little Darling sounded awesome when I first saw the summary and the picture online, but the story was more a gag than anything else. If you're looking for a real boyXboy novel, try the Only the Ring Finger Knows series. There's three of those, and some real romance. If you're looking for some laughs, then this one might be more what you're looking for. Borrow it from a friend if you can.
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