High School Debut 11 by Kazune Kawahara: B+

From the back cover:
Haruna becomes worried when she sees Yoh hanging out with an unattractive classmate. (Yoh does seem to have strange taste in women, after all…) She has good reason for feeling uneasy—it looks like this girl really does want to sabotage their relationship!

Review:
The main reason I love High School Debut is that it skewers some of the typical shojo clichés—the reappearance of an old girlfriend, for instance—by simply having its leads communicate with each other. Volume eleven, alas, is a disappointment in that regard.

It begins when Haruna spots Yoh smiling (a pretty rare occurrence) at his cram school classmate and finds this so painful that her heart is sick. Her mood is buoyed when Yoh asks her on a date, but he fails to show when said classmate, Miyabi, appears to collapse from heat stroke. Of course Yoh is not the type of guy who’d ignore someone in that plight, but he’s left his cell phone at home and can’t call Haruna, leaving her waiting for hours. Later, when he calls to explain what happened, Haruna is torn. She wouldn’t like Yoh if he weren’t the type of guy to be kind to someone in need, but insecurity and jealousy flare up again when she imagines him caring for Miyabi so attentively, and she hangs up on him. I actually love all of this bit, because I can utterly sympathize with Haruna’s reaction, how when you love someone you want to keep him all to yourself.

The part I don’t like comes in when Miyabi begins scheming and fiddles with Yoh’s phone so it blocks Haruna’s calls, sends a break up text, and redirects the contact for Haruna to point to her own phone. AND YOH BUYS IT! He talks to her a couple times and doesn’t realize she’s not Haruna! So, on top of the frustration of our main couple not being able to exert their excellent communication skills to resolve things, has apparently become unable to discern his girlfriend’s voice from that of a relative stranger. Granted, he begins to have his doubts pretty quickly, but it’s annoying all the same. Haruna’s annoying, too, since she evidently believes that Yoh is capable of breaking up with her over a text message, which he is not. At least the resolution to this is rather sweet.

The final chapter sees everyone back at school and Haruna trying to think of something special to do for Yoh’s birthday. Someone at work suggests an overnight trip, and she innocently runs with the idea, seeing it only as an opportunity to go somewhere new. Asami finally clues her in to the implications of an overnight trip and, instead of talking to Yoh about it, Haruna reads some of her brother’s magazines about guys and their attitudes towards sex, purchases some frilly lingerie, and tries to psych herself up to do it with Yoh so he won’t stop liking her. Argh! I dunno, I guess this cluelessness and searching for answers in dodgy print sources is perfectly in character for Haruna, but it’s never bugged me like this before. Perhaps it’s because it comes on the heels of the previous chapter.

In any case, despite the irksome elements in this volume, High School Debut has so much warmth and charm that my overall impression is not diminished. In fact, I’m sad there are only two volumes left!

Review copy provided by the publisher.