薫る花は凛と咲く - The Fragrant Flower Blooms with Dignity
Summary
Chidori High is a boys’ school that takes in the dregs of society with the lowest grades. Next door stands Kikyo Girls’ High, where the wealthy, high-class families send their precious daughters. Chidori second-year Rintaro, who has a fierce face but a gentle heart, is helping at his family’s patisserie when he meets a girl named Kaoruko. The two hit it off right away…but this blissful peace is quickly disturbed when Rintaro discovers that Kaoruko is actually a student at Kikyo. Worse, she doesn’t seem to realize what a huge problem this really is! Will these two be able to forge a path for themselves, and sidestep the traps (metaphorical and literal) laid by their classmates?
Availability
Physical: Amazon JP / CD Japan / Kinokuniya
Digital: Bookwalker / Rakuten / Kindle JP
Natively Level: 20
Personal Opinion
The plot is exactly the kind of stuff I gush over. I read to the end of Bookwalker’s preview and intend to finish eventually, but it does seem like it’s at the upper limit for this club: there weren’t many pages with no text, and there’s a good amount of super casual speech. But the mcs are both precious and cute, plus there’s an anime coming next year so it must be pretty popular.
Pros and Cons for the Book Club
Pros
- High school setting, vocab should be easy
- Hardly any handwritten text, in the 31 page preview I counted five pages, and four of those were just sound effects
- Anime hype train
Cons
- Art is simplistic and nothing special
- We may be getting tired of romance by now
