If you've been reading Rin Mikimoto's previously translated works, you may have figured out that she has a thing for the age-gap romance – all of her other translated works but Kira-kun Today fall under that heading. This time she's trying something new in the field: rather than having her heroine fall in love with a teacher (Love's Reach) or a famous, slightly older celebrity (Kiss Me at the Stroke of Midnight), the older man Sumire falls for is in her high school class, and unlike titles like A Girl and Her Guard Dog, he appears to be there strictly to learn.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with going back at a nontraditional age to finish your education, so although it's odd, it's not bad that 20-year-old Reo is sitting in a second-year high school classroom even if in real life we more often see this play out at the university level. While people are confused about Reo's presence, no one really makes any disparaging remarks about it, possibly because they're all three-quarters convinced that he's some sort of evil yakuza delinquent, a belief that the lightning bolt-shaped scar on his cheek only reinforces. Reo doesn't necessarily seem to mind that his classmates are largely afraid of him, possibly because he's very much aware that he's an adult in a room full of children, and while we don't get any real answers about why he's completing high school now, the very fact that he is doing so seems to be more important, and that, if we extrapolate from volume two, it's borne out of a desire to make up for some misspent youth.

That he also is much more fervent in his attempts to fend Sumire off than some of Mikimoto's other heroes is a bit of a saving grace as well. He knows that this is maybe not an awesome relationship to be embarking on. He does his level best to drive Sumire away, putting on a very good show in volume one of being disinterested, one which begins to crumble a bit in volume two. This is at least in part because Sumire comes from the Chutzpah School of Romance Heroines, and she's not about to let him dictate her feelings – especially not when he's kind of bad at hiding that he may like her, too (which begins to creep out in the first book and becomes solidified in the second). Despite the reciprocal nature of their feelings, however, he remains unrelenting in his commitment to not date Sumire. While we can all make a good guess that this really isn't going to last, the “we can't” approach is a nice change from the “no, really, I swear I don't like you” tactic that I feel like we see more of in the genre. That he seems to have some very good reasons beyond simply being older than her is an intriguing bit of story-building, and while it may turn out to be reasons that only Reo thinks are important, just being able to stick to his guns around the very open Sumire does a nice job of illustrating to the reader that he really is an adult to her teenager.

That Reo's family is somehow involved in all of this feels like a given by the end of volume two. We know from the outset of the series that he has a tenuous relationship with them, but the fancy party that Sumire's author father drags her to as his plus-one (he's a single dad and appears to be mostly devoted to his daughter) reveals that there may be more than run-of-the-mill estrangement going on. One of the best scenes in the these volumes comes from volume two, when Sumire stands up to Reo's grandfather for him; she doesn't have a full grasp of what's going on, but she can tell from the impressively tense undercurrent to their conversation that he's pressuring Reo to do things he's not comfortable with, and since she doesn't have a horse in their race (so to speak), she's in a better position to speak up. It also emphasizes how much younger she is emotionally than Reo; she lacks a grasp of the social nuances of the situation, or at least is young enough that she doesn't care about them. It may be only a few years, but the scene really does emphasize how big a difference there can be between your late teens and early twenties in terms of understanding – and that Sumire's actions feel like the right ones may say something about the social pressures Reo has learned to cave to.

Naturally around this time in volume two we learn that he and Sumire knew each other in the past, and that she's inadvertently behind his switch from his bad-boy ways to where he is now. Reo refuses to say more than that, hedging that it was a small nothing to Sumire that meant the world to him, and that's intriguing, but it needs development if it is to be a mitigating factor in their budding romance's inappropriateness. There's also a bit of an insta-love feel to Sumire falling for him, made more prominent by the fact that she's more than ready for romance, as we see from her conversations with her best friend Rio. That does make him feel a bit more like "convenient love" than "true love," although his attachment to her from the past does indicate that such will not always be the case. It's a contrived situation all around, but there's still enough here to make this worth following, especially if you've enjoyed Mikimoto's work before, and her ugly-cute art style with its chibis looks much better here than in previous series. (Although we won't talk about some of the questionable outfits that appear in the party chapters.) It's an age-gap romance with a different hook, and by volume two, that hook is baited well enough that it'll be hard to resist volume three.