Title: Suki Volume(s): 3 Creator(s): CLAMP Format: Unflipped; Right-to-Left Publisher: Tokyopop MSRP: $9.95 Genre(s): Drama/Romance Rated: Teen (13+)

In my opinion, CLAMP series have slowly but surely become the series I despise to review. I just can’t win with them. Regardless whether I give their books a high grade or a low grade I always, ALWAYS, receive negative feedback from various different people, most of whom think I’m being too harsh on the series (“Miyuki-chan In Wonderland”) or too kind (“Chobits”) in my reviews. I always make it known that I am a very big fan of CLAMP, but at the end of the day I do NOT see them as a bunch of gods (or is that goddess’s)!? I think of them as human beings who are writing and created manga series for money. They happen to write some very good manga, but they still have flaws, and just because a series is written by CLAMP does not make it instant gold. I think CLAMP’s stories make instant soup, but depending on what kind of soup they make depends on whether or not I’ll enjoy it or not (I’ll almost always finish it so that I can grade it though).

“Suki” is one of CLAMP’s fewer known series out there, and it may not be well known for a good reasons. It is a mere three volumes long, and it comes with the subtitle “A Like Story,” and you can decide what that’s supposed to mean on your own if you’d like, because as far as I can see it means nothing. The story of “Suki” revolves around a super friendly and super hyper high school student named Hinata Asahi (or Hina for short). Hina is the sort of girl who everyone loves, she never thinks bad about anyone else, when she gets really happy she seems to morph into another animal like most girls like her in shoujo manga (in this case Hina grows flappy dog ears and a tail, which she just LOVES to wag rapidly when she’s happy), is completely naive to any danger or problems in the world (to the point of being stupid), she talks to her teddy bears (no joke), and Hina is (most importantly) just one happy girl. The thing that is really strange about Hina is that she’s the ultimate happy go-lucky girl, yet she lives alone in a big house and she usually has no one to talk to except her teddy bears, yet she isn’t ever lonely.

Or so she claims. Despite the way she may act, I believe that because Hina talks to her teddy bears as if they were real people proves that Hina is in fact very lonely and just doesn’t want to admit it. However she doesn’t let this get in the way of things, and she lives a normal life as if nothing bothered her, and ironically enough her feelings and emotions are the one part of the story that gets ignored in this series for the most part (she's always happy, but CLAMP never tells us WHY she's always happy when she is living alone in a huge house and being kidnaped every two weeks for ransom money). Hina also has two best friends named Touko and Emi, who’s only purpose in this series (it seems) is to worry about Hina’s lack of common sense, then comment that if Hina had common sense then she wouldn’t be Hina (huh?), pat her on the head, comment on how cheerful she is today (as if she’s ever not cheerful), and give her a worried stare whenever she makes a friend with an adult. It may seem like her friends play a big part in the series, but the only friend that does anything useful (and different) is Emi, and she doesn’t do anything real special until book 3 (noticing a trend yet). Otherwise though these girls do nothing but comment on how happy she is, and stare coldly at Hina whenever she express's interest in becoming friends with an adult.

Anyway, the actual story of this series is supposed to be a romance. The story begins with Hina falling out of a tree and landing on her new neighbor Shiro Asou, who for reasons not known until book 3, is moving into the abandoned house that resides next to Hina at midnight (which is a very unlikely situation don’t you think). Almost immediately Hina falls in love with this 32 year old man (yes, you heard me: thirty two year old man). However it turns out that Shiro is also going to be Hina’s substitute teacher at school too! Well Hina is very happy about this, however Touko and Emi are less then thrilled about this new revelation (but of course, neither of them do anything about the situation). The reason being is that every time a new teacher has come to their school, Hina has been kidnaped for ransom, and apparently this has happened NINE time already!?! Hina’s friends warn her to stay away from Shiro because of what happened in the past, but her royal cluelessness has no idea what they are talking about, and just gives them her confused teddy bear eye’s and fluffy dog ears as an indication that there will be no serious conversations in this series.

And for a good two and a half books this is all that happens. Hina finds new things to love about Shiro. Shiro shows no interest in Hina, and he constantly tells his friends that it is simply his job to watch her. What kind of work you ask? You’ll find out in book 3. At one point we find out that the title of the series, “Suki,” got it's name because there is a series of children’s books in this series about teddy bears that Hina loves to read, and these books are sometimes used to move the story forward. This style of story telling will be familiar to people who have read CLAMP’s excellent series “Chobits,” however the effects this story device have here feel a little dry, and after Hina read the first book I usually found myself shipping over the rest of the (teddy bear) books out of complete and utter boredom. I must also admit that I am not completely sure what the big deal with teddy bears are in this book. We see the bears on the covers, Hina constantly wears them on her backpack, and the “Suki” books that Hina reads are about teddy bears, yet the teddy bears seem to serve no real purpose in the story since little to no time is spent on the bears themselves. They just seem to be in this series to look cute (which I personally didn’t find them to be, however your opinion on this may vary).

The artwork is also a bit of a mess, as none of the artwork ever looks unique, never stands out, and honestly the artwork is never really even good in this series. The character designs look very cheap and lack the life and personality you usually find in CLAMP series, and the backgrounds and everything else looks very rough, as if someone decided that the artwork was a second thought and scribbled the art really fast to finish this series in time. The results make the whole series look cheap and rushed, and there are very few times when the artwork works in the stories favor. As if the artwork didn’t feel rushed, the story also moves at a snails pace, with little to nothing happening. Sometimes a conversation will come up in one of the chapters, and then it will be brought up again in another chapter, and then it will be brought up again, and again, and again …in all honesty, I was this close to giving up on this series for the simple fact that this series just becomes too repetitive, and this series isn't even 5 books long! Another problem is that the characters never appear to be very deep, and for the most part the characters don't really do anything, and nothing in general really happens in this series either. Because of this, the story moves along at a snails pace with little motivation to keep us interested. However then we get to book 3 of the series.

There’s a reason I kept mentioning book 3 throughout this review, and that’s because book 3 is really this series only saving grace. In the third book we finally get some insight as to what every characters intentions are, we get some neat little story twists, and we actually get a pretty decent ending to wrap up the series (which is, sadly, highly unusual for a CLAMP series). If book 3 hadn’t come along and saved this series butt, then the grade at the bottom of this page would have been MUCH lower then it is now! However even if book 3 does make the series much better then it originally started out as, this is still a hard book to recommend. The story just never seems to be interesting until book 3 comes along, the characters are boring as hell, the artwork is almost never good, and this series has three books in it, which in my eye’s is one book too many as this series could have easily been wrapped up in only two books. And as stated above, the characters personalities and the story pacing could have been much better. But the third book was just good enough to make me give this series a passing grade…however minor that may be. “Suki” is not one of the best series CLAMP has created, but it is certainly not the worst series they've created either. It's just a severely flawed soup that is hot and tasty in some spots, but is overall just too cold for the taste to really agree with you. What this soup needed was to be micro waved for 70 seconds.

Instead, they cooked it for 30.

- -Review By Kevin T. Rodriguez- -