Absolute Beginners Book Club // Now Reading: Granny Girl Hinata chan!

ChristopherFritz · April 19, 2020, 12:39am

Now seems as good a time as any to nominate a manga for a future vote. While my main planned nomination is stuck in mental limbo on whether it’d be ABBC or BBC, I feel this one may be best here.

レンタルおにいちゃん

Summary

From volume 1’s online store listing:

両親の他界…優しかった兄の豹変…独りぼっちで傷ついた少女は昔の兄の優しさを求め、“おにいちゃん”をレンタルする―――お金で。「レンタルでも、私は“家族（ぬくもり）”がほしい。」

Her parents have passed away… Her kind big brother has changed completely… A girl, alone and hurt, in search of the kindness of who her brother used to be, she rents a “big brother”…for money. “Even if it’s a rental, I want family (warmth).”

My summary:

Little Kanami has lost the warmth of family at home, following first the death of her parents, and second her once-kind big brother becoming distant and abusive. She lacks the warmth of friendship at school, where classmates either bully or ignore her. When things seem to be at their worst, Kanami meets Makoto, a young man whose kindness is exactly what’s missing from her life. Makoto, seeing a reflection of his own childhood in Kanami, offers a proposition: any time she’s feeling down, she can rent time with him as a big brother.

Availability

Physical: Amazon | CDJapan

Digital: Pixiv | BookLive! | BOOK☆WALKER | ebookjapan | Kobo

Personal Opinion

I’ve been reading through 「レンタルおにいちゃん」, and it’s one of the easiest I’ve manga I’ve read yet. Being a manga, the artwork helps with following what’s going on. There is no specialized genre-specific vocabulary to learn.

The story is fairly grounded, with a very small cast of main characters. The hardships don’t feel overly forced, and they’re offset with positive outcomes.

I decided to nominate for Absolute Beginner Book Club because I think it’d be too easy and too quick of a read for the Beginner Book Club. (However, I can move my nomination there if consensus here is that this would be too difficult for ABBC.)

Pros and Cons for the Book Club

Pros

Story is fairly simple, and easy to follow.
Good mix of simple pages and more difficult pages.
Volume is fairly self-contained, without ending at a major cliffhanger.
Series is only four volumes long, so if anyone wants to read beyond the first volume, it’s a short series.

Cons

Story involves moments of verbal, psychological, and slight physical abuse, which some readers may be uneasy about.
Due to some dialogue-heavy pages along the way, at the slowest reasonable reading pace, it could take up to three months to complete.
In the e-manga release, occasionally furigana is a little difficult to read. (Very minor.)
Volume is first in a series. While there’s no real cliffhanger at the end of the volume, it’s clearly only a portion of the complete work. (But when has that stopped a nomination from being picked?)