Ciao Ciao Bambino by Momoko Tenzen
Publisher: DMP June
Price: $12.95
Genre: Shounen-Ai (Boy’s Love), Romance, Drama
Themes: High School, Teacher-Student Relations, Misunderstandings
Rating: Older Teen 16+
Volumes: 1
ISBNs: 978-1-56970-077-8
Note: Picture taken with my iPhone from my manga library.
Basic Premise:
One-shot manga with multiple stories:
– Ciao Ciao Bambino (title story) – Kaname Imai is a cram school teacher who has fallen for Yuuta Fujimoto, one his students. Yuuta feels the same. Now they just have to find a way to tell each other.
– Honey Citron – Yuuta’s two cram school friends Nishio and Mako seem to start having issues when they realize they may want to be more than just friends.
– Going Steady & Swing On Over – Yuuta and Kaname are back. Yuuta is older and bolder and Kaname has to find a way to indulge without getting caught.
– Brand New Wednesday 1 & 2 – Nakahara is Kana’s home tutor. Kana has a crush on Nakahara but it seems like Nakahara is just using Kana as a gap-fill for the one he truly loves.
Sex Shown:
Hugging, kissing and naked chest pressing. Very tame.
Review:
Yuuta and Kaname’s story had me worried for a bit there since it starts off with Yuuta in middle school. Whoa, hold up there DMP, you guys publish the underage stuff??? Well, that wasn’t the case. Kaname and Yuuta’s relationship doesn’t go past a kiss until Yuuta is in high school. So that was a good thing. 😛
Yuuta and Kaname are so cute together. Their story made the book for me. This whole manga was a toe-in-to-check-the-water type of manga. Just enough to tease but not to satisfy… and I don’t mean the sex. It gave you a glimpse of each couples’s lives but not a full look. Each couple could have floated an entire manga all on their own.
That is especially true for Nishio and Mako. Momoko-sensei barely scrapped the surface with those two. They were something like an after thought. Or maybe, she wasn’t quite sure what to do with them so she left it where it was.
The last story in the manga about Nakahara and Kana was completely unrelated to the first few stories, which threw me for a little while. I kept trying to figure out how the characters were related but they weren’t, but that didn’t detract from the story.
Brand New Wednesday was the most fleshed out of all the stories though it still could have been longer. Nakahara and Kana are cute together simply because they both don’t know how to sit down and listen. They would rather jump to conclusions and make assumptions based on flimsy evidence. But, that’s the whole drama of the story.
For a cute quick read that isn’t too deep, this is the perfect read.