more bl novel reading

[insaneneko]

Thanks to zehavit_lamasu posting all those illustrations in dgsc, I decided to give Flesh & Blood volume 1 another go. I had bought it kind of a while back and had not been impressed. But the art and a story with pirates and a boy thrown back in time compelled me to try again. I've been reading bits of it these last two days, and I've come to realize what irritated me the first time around: too much exposition. There's about five pages in the very beginning of the book devoted to the main character bitching about how his mother is, er, a bitch. And the author seems to be of the tell not show school. No, she couldn't have examples of actual conversations where the mother is shown, via her own words, that she's a bitch. Instead we have Kaito, the main character, complain and whine about her for page after page. There's way too much sharing of background information when other characters are introduced as well. It really bogged down the narrative for me. BUT I have a feeling that things should be more action oriented from here on end, since it seems like the major characters have been introduced in the first book...So maybe the story will actually be allowed to, you know, flow. I wonder how the drama CD is? They must have cut all the crap and just gone for the basics, making it a much better story overall than the novel.

I didn't realize that Vincente, the Spaniard who initially finds Kaito after he's thrown back in time, was so hot. I vaguely recalled him comparing Kaito to his poor dead sister and wanting to be all protective, so I imagined him kind of...older. Seeing his picture again I was like..WOW.

Oh, in case anyone was not familiar with the story and was curious about it, it's about a Japanese boy living in England going back in time to 1587, right before the war between Spain and England. He ends up in the care of debonair ship captain Geoffrey...er...whateverhislastnameis as his cabin boy. Later, he ends up telling Geoffrey and Sir Francis Drake that he's actually a seer who can see the future. He "proves" this by telling them a piece of history he knows. They figure he's safest from any political machinations at sea, so he returns to Geoffrey's ship where we have a mix of sexual harrasment and true affection. And that's about as far as the first novel goes. I really wonder when Kaito is going to be exposed as a fraud. I mean, he can't keep it up indefinitely, right?

I guess I'll be buying the rest of the series used next time I'm in Japan.

Comments

[zehavit-lamasu.livejournal.com]

The most annoying thing is how EVERYONE is falling for Kaito. I prefer it if there was more of a love triangle rather than a love...err... chevron. It is hardly a realistic novel (perhaps I am used to read too many gay historical novels from the west), I read a translation of part of book four in which Geoffrey grabs Kaito and kisses him in the street in England, in public, in broad day light. An act that would have got them both hanged at the time... nit picky perhaps but it did make me wince >_<.

[insaneneko.livejournal.com]

I haven't gotten to the part where everyone falls in love with Kaito, but I'm not surprised. I look at this series as part of the "normal Japanese student ends up in another world" genre, where invariably they are made much of and half the people fall for them (deserved or not). If looked at that way, the series makes sense (at least, so far). I try to turn off any expectation of realism (otherwise I'd have been ranting about several things that happened in this book alone) so as to enjoy it for what it is. ^^;