Thanks to barnesandnoble.com for the image.

CANT’ WIN WITH YOU 3

JUNE MANGA/DMP BOOKS
CARTOONISTS: Yukine Honami & Satosumi Takaguchi
ISBN: 978-1-56970-821-7; Romance/Comedy; Rated “M” for “Mature Audiences 18+”
208 pp., B&W, $12.95; paperback w/dust jacket

The students of Shuuiku Academy are leaving for summer vacation.  Quiet and shy Yuuhi Torishama lives nearby in the same backwoods country that Shuuiku calls home.  Still, he has to stay on campus for the summer while his home is being remodeled.  Sango Tsutsui is staying behind to keep an eye on the school.  Yuuhi is secretly happy to be alone on campus with the older and taller Sango, so will the lack of prying eyes allow the two of them to get together?

Can’t Win with You!, Vol. 3 offers a gentle kind of boys’ love (“BL,” comics that depict love between two males).  It’s charming mood and playful atmosphere – the gentle ribbing and teasing between the boys and playful banter – belie the notion at the heart of Can’t Win with You!, which is that these affable, friendly students are engaging in sex with one another.

This volume is actually a pleasant and fun read.  It includes a chapter in which a lusty male student finds himself frequently being fondled by a spirit!  In another story, Yuuhi has a dream in which one of the boy/boy couples has actually given birth to a baby boy.  That story is so weird, but also very wistful.  It’s stuff like this that makes Can’t Win with You both peculiar and fun.

A-