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Review: 寄宿学校のジュリエット Kishuku Gakkou no Juliet One-Shot

寄宿学校のジュリエット Kishuku Gakkou no Juliet One-Shot 寄宿学校のジュリエット Kishuku Gakkou no Juliet One-Shot by Yousuke Kaneda
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

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(Reading links on bottom of review / これを読む場所のリンクはこのレビューの下にあります)

The Juliet of Boarding School one-shot was an absolute blast! It’s a romantic comedy that’s pretty literally Romeo and Juliet set in a boarding school. Instead of rival families there’s rival races… Which is kind of… Um… But it was fun anyway.

Our Romeo is part of the Japanese squad and our Juliet is part of the British squad, and I guess this school is really racist or something because these two squads don’t get along at all. Romeo and Juliet are the gang leaders for their respective posses, but oh? What is this? They are in love! How scandalous. Thus the conflict for this one-shot (and eventual series) is set up.

I’m hoping the reason for the two side’s hate towards each other will be explained in the actual manga of this series, because they didn’t really explain it here. Taking into consideration that this is a forty-two page one-shot, I’ll give it some slack on the lack of worldbuilding.

One of the two main things that made me really enjoy this was how unexpectedly funny it was. This one-shot made me laugh out loud six times, which was fantastic. I didn’t even know that it was going to be funny. The comedy stemmed from the character’s actions and reaction faces. Since Romeo and Juliet love each other but have to pretend to hate each other, seeing them try to keep up their facade of hate is quite humourous.

Now, let's talk about the faces. I’ve seen funny faces done right (My Hero Academia), and I’ve seen funny faces done wrong (Grand Blue). Juliet of Boarding School did it fantastically right. The faces were incorporated in a way that made them still funny and surprising to the reader while also not looking completely out of place with the art style. What Grand Blue did wrong in my opinion was that their funny faces were basically just the characters contorting their faces and looking extremely ugly all the time, which was fun at first, but got old really quick. The faces in Juliet of Boarding School still look good with the rest of the art, and are funny without sacrificing the character’s dignity and completely changing their face/making them unrecognizable.

The second reason I really enjoyed this one-shot was because of the phenomenal art. I loved it, so, so, so so so so soo very much. Romeo and Juliet both look super duper cute. They’re just so nice to look at; You can see a peek of them in the banner for this review. But it's not just them of course, all of the art in the manga is great. This one-shot was such a pleasure for my eyes.

If I had to give this some criticism I’d say that though I enjoyed it, it may not have been all that original. I mean, it’s literally Romeo and Juliet, so there’s one ding, but then the rest of what happens in the one-shot was also nothing totally new. Even though they’re already dating, the plot basically ends up centering around this one miscommunication (yeah, I know, another bad ding) that was something that would happen if they weren’t dating, but because they are dating it seems a bit out of place. Like, while I was reading I was thinking about how they both should already know better than to worry about it. But then again, because of this miscommunication, hilarity was able to ensue so that was great.

Overall this was quite enjoyable. I’ve read three other one-shots in the past couple months (only two are on GoodReads) and this is definitely on top. I’m really excited to get to the manga and see where the author takes this series.


Where to read this (in Japanese only): (view spoiler)

（日本語）これを読む場所: (view spoiler)


Click to read all of my Juliet of Boarding School Reviews:
One-shot*
Volumes: 1, 2, 3, 4

*Current review


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