Ryu’s Musings – Angus’s Lost Lady Volume 01

4910120270480B Language: English
Direction: Right to Left
Pages: 157
by: Kazuko Fujita, Marie Ferrarella
Publisher: Harlequin K.K./SOFTBANK Creative Corp.
Type: One-shot
Genre: Romance, Josei
Synopsis:

"Do you know who I am?" Rebecca, a girl with no memory and a missing shoe, arrives at Angus’s private detective agency. She found his business card in her coat pocket, but Angus does not know who she is. Angus invites the shivering and frightened girl into his warm home where he lives with his young daughter. Soon they become powerfully attracted to each other, but on the morning after they first make love, a man claiming to be Rebecca’s fiancé appears…!

Characters:

Three characters of note in this volume. Firstly we have our damsel in distress, Rebecca.

As a character Rebecca is hard to judge. Given the way she is at the moment (as in memory loss), it’s hard to actually decide if she’s done badly or not. Character design wise I do like the way she’s done.

Vikki, the little girl of the story (she is little, only 7 years old), I like the way she is a good mix of being a child but also mature. She’s cute and has an excellent design, I really liked everything about her, she has a well defined personality that is well matched with her character design.

Angus, our knight in shining armour sadly is a bit ‘meh’. There are reasons for this which I’ll get into in the next section. What I do like is his character design, which has a good strong feel to it.

General Thoughts:

I both liked and disliked this volume. Art wise I don’t really have any complaints, the settings are well thought out and are well drawn. Also the supporting characters are fairly well drawn, though nothing special. Yet at the same time they’re a bit comical, such as Al, the cop.

The story, for what it is, was well covered and it does get the main points of the story across. However this is also the bit I dislike, the story hasn’t been adapted very well, resulting in a overly fast paced manga.

Some of the character relationships change to fast to be really feasible, though I do like Rebecca and Vikki’s relationship. While  theirs isn’t a pronounced relationship, they have a good bond and excellent chemistry.

Sadly, the main relationship, of Rebecca and Angus suffers badly from the speed of the volume. Reading it through it’s hard not to see Angus as a ‘bad guy’, since he goes from being all concerned and worried over her loss of memory, to sleeping with her.

The end result isn’t the bad thing, it’s the pace the volume goes to get there, as well as the actual size of the volume. The average manga runs for around 190 pages, this one ran for 160, even those extra thirty pages would have made a huge difference I think.

I also think the adaptation could have been handled better, with more tension added with the hunt of finding who she is and who tried to kill her. We also could have seen more love and romance building between Angus and Rebecca, and bonding with Vikki.

Granted it’s a generic romance story with nothing new in it, but stories such as this do have a role to play, and a place in people’s collections. While I’m disappointed with it’s length and the way it was adapted, it’s one I’d still buy, but then I do love titles like this.

Publisher Handling:

Although I read this on DMP’s eManga site, it’s not one of their releases, which I can honestly say I’m thankful for. The way this has been edited feels like a quick fix scanlation. While I’ll admit the translation looks fine, the editing, the choice of fonts and sizing of the text, are all off. Giving the volume a cheap feel. If this was a print volume, I wouldn’t touch, no matter how much I like the story, I don’t consider it worth buying. However, since it’s only being released as a digital manga on eManga, I’m more inclined to buy it. Though I will admit that I wish the publishers had done more with this.

Author: Ryu Sheng