Kanokon Omnibus 1-2 [Paperback]

This book contains the first volumes of Kanokon. Beautiful cover and the pages are easy to read. This is truly my favorite manga series. Shipping was fast and quick. Seller did a good job with packaging. I am very happy with my purchase and I hope others will too.

A big problem with ordering the first book of a new series, especially when there aren't many reviews written for it, is that you have to go off of the summary that was provided. Its even more of a problem when you preorder it, not really knowing much of what you invested in. Well, I ordered it knowing nothing about it other than the summary simply because it sounded interesting enough to want to read. I didn't really expect much out of it at first. I liked the artwork and such, and once I actually started getting into the story, I was pleased with my buy. I enjoyed it much more than I thought I would and I was pleased with how much I actually did enjoy it. In the end, I'm actually looking forward to the next omnibus release since it really is a good and pleasant read. That said, if you're interested in the book, I easily recommend giving it a try.

This is surprisingly cute and endearing. I picked this up several times in the bookstore and pretty much discarded it because it just looked to be too typical of a series. I just figured it's your typical manga where you have girls with bouncing breasts that fall all over the main hero for rather superficial reasons. (You breathed? Oh my gosh, I'm in love with you now because you spouted some moronic speech about the topic of the day!) I enjoy these mangas, but long time readers of these types of things will understand that after a while a sense of ennui will set in because you've seen it all before.

Now before I get your hopes up, I want to let you know that there isn't much in Kanokon that you haven't seen elsewhere. It's very much your stereotypical supernatural harem manga in many aspects. You have a beautiful lead female that's in love with Kouta for reasons that ultimately fall under wish fulfillment. There's also the introductions of several other female characters that all seem to have some sort of romantic interests towards him, as well as the inevitable conflict that shows up in various formats.

However there's just something about this that drew me in after a while. The artwork here is nice and I've enjoyed that the artist made a distinct difference between the different forms of Chizuru (human and fox). I also liked that at times Kouta seems to just go along with the flow and did identify Chizuru as pretty much being his girlfriend from the start, something that other series of this type don't normally do. It also helps that Nishino also tried to set up other pairings in the manga and doesn't entirely push various female characters onto Kouta, such as his childhood friend.

The only downfall is that sometimes you don't really get as good of a look at some of the secondary characters as you'd like, so people looking for an especially deep story will come out of this feeling like they're missing out on something. This might be due to this story originating as a light novel series and getting made into a manga after the fact. In such cases there's usually the anticipation of the reader being familiar with the source material, so the authors don't incorporate all of the details.

In any case, this is a cute enough series that I'd recommend to people interested in harem manga with a supernatural twist. I'd suggest flipping through this at the bookstore or getting it from the library first, just to ensure that you want to invest the dollars in it first, though.