Overview
Kimi ni todoke is about two girls, Kurumi and Sawako, who both have feelings for the same guy, Kazehaya. Sound familiar? Welcome to the plot of nearly every single shojo manga to hit the shelves. Along with these two rivals/friends (no, really) is a cast of boys and girls, and even one that had me confused for a minute, ever ready to attempt to induce more laughter and tears in this high school drama.
 
Kurumi is the popular girl, pretty with her long blonde curls, wide eyes, and a secret agenda to mess with anyone who gets in the way of her goals. Sawako is the plain girl, the social outcast, with the not-surprising inner beauty (that apparently becomes a physical beauty once everyone sees how nice looking she is with her hair tied up in a bun) and unintentional knack for getting her love interest’s attention. Kurumi has been in love with Kazehaya since junior high, and she feels threatened by Sawako’s newfound interest in the same boy because, as Kurumi puts it, it’s easy for Sawako to get attention because it’s not difficult for a social reject to gain people’s sympathy, while being popular and pretty makes it so much harder to get even a look from the one boy she wants it from.
 
Highlights
The artwork in Kimi ni todoke, though nothing new or noteworthy, is nice to look at. It’s not over the top with details to the point where you’re wondering where her hair stops and the words start, but it’s also not so plain that you can’t understand how they got published in the first place. The pace of the story fluctuates between too slow and too fast, and there seemed to be attempts at humor in the form of Kurumi’s non-existent face lotion, though whenever it was mentioned, it felt more like a forced attempt to gain a laugh than genuine humor.
 
Volume 4 starts off with Kurumi and Sawako both confessing to each other that they have a crush on the same boy, thus severing any friendship they may have had in the previous volumes. Kurumi continues to talk to Sawako, but it is merely to tell her how Sawako’s feelings for Kazehaya aren’t real, how she should find someone else, and most importantly, to stay away from Kazehaya. When the two are not together, Kurumi is finding lies to tell and rumors to start to make Kazehaya think Sawako’s not interested, while Sawako pretty much gets walked on like a doormat while simultaneously being praised for being a good athlete. Throw in Sawako’s two friends trying to figure out who’s been starting all these rumors, and a couple of boys whose only agenda is to be filler, and you have Volume 4.
 
Overall
As a reader of shojo manga, this plotline is pretty much the same as almost any other shojo series I’ve come across. The storyline is basic and has been recycled countless times, and throughout the whole thing, I tried to figure out why this series was anything worth reading. The characters are flat and any feelings they express don’t seem to hit home; any hope of being funny flopped more often than not; and with such a wide variety of better manga to choose from, this one falls to somewhere around the bottom of the list. This manga’s saving grace is that fans of the series will get quite a shocker at the end of the volume in a confrontation between Sawako and Kazehaya.
 
ComicsOnline gives Kimi ni todoke vol. 4 2 bad face lotion jokes out of 5.

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