Yuki Obata

A cute and fairly realistic shoujo manga. Hitomi has a crush on her classmate Miyamoto, a somewhat immature but ultimately kind-hearted guy. As their class prepares for their middle school graduation, Hitomi is encouraged by her friends to confess her feelings to him. Naturally, things don't go quite as planned, and the two enter high school with Miyamoto ignorant of Hitomi's feelings. There's also an extra one-shot at the end called "23:55 I love you" chronicling the story of Saho, who makes a vow to spend New Year's Eve with the guy she likes.

Obata has a very light and simple art style; she uses lines and textures very sparingly compared to other shoujo manga which makes for nice, clean panels where the focus is on the characters' expressions. Unfortunately, the characters all seem to be limited to just a few facial expressions each, mostly switching between muted surprise and dismay for the girls, and boredom or smugness for the boys. Obata could also use some variety in her character designs. The lead couple in both stories have such similar hairstyles that it would have been hard to tell them apart if they weren't in two separate stories. I had trouble differentiating between some of the minor characters as well.

The stories themselves are pretty typical of shoujo manga-- mostly, the male love interests are nice but completely clueless as the girls pine after them and fumble through failed attempts to get the boys' attentions, while not realizing that the guys are already noticing them in other ways. The characterizations are standard archetypes-- the guys are always fairly popular and the girls are shy wallflowers. All in all, a decent read but not something that I would revisit.… (mais)

When I picked up the first volume of We Were There I was also beginning to read Sand Chronicles, another series that had been recommended along with this one. While I loved Sand Chronicles from the beginning, I found We Were There to be a huge disappointment. It had all the negative cliches you sometimes find in some of the worse shojo mangas: a ditzy, overly submissive, clueless girl with a crush. The popular, bad boy hot-dude with a tendency to be emotionally abusive. The Nice Guy who'd probably be an excellent boyfriend for the girl, but you know will end up in second place. It seemed predictable, and the romance was so unbelievable to me that I almost stopped reading there.
I'm so glad I didn't. This wasn't a perfect series by any means, but the character development and growth that occurred over these 16 volumes was worth it. Once Yuuki Obata started throwing out some real issues and experiences for Takahashi, Yano, and the rest of the group to deal with, it ratcheted up the drama and made this a really interesting series to continue reading. This final volume throws a few more twists and turns at the reader and even brought a tear to my eye a couple of times before ending on a satisfying note.
I don't usually like writing reviews for books, but in the end I was very wrong about this series so I feel like I owe it this.… (mais)