The Spring 2021 Manga Guide

Nina the Starry Bride

What's It About? 

Nina had a rough start to life, stealing to survive—and eventually being sold into slavery by her own brother. But to her surprise, her captor, Prince Azure, ordained that she would live the life of a princess...specifically, that of the recently deceased princess-priestess, Alisha. But despite her changing fortune, Nina won't give up her old life without a fight...and Azure might just be the one to finally match her wits. But how much can she trust Azure? And can she stop the feelings budding in her heart, knowing she must eventually marry another...?

Nina the Starry Bride is scripted and illustrated by Rikachi. The digital version of its first volume is currently available at Kodansha for $7.99.

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Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

There's something almost comforting about the familiarity of Nina the Starry Bride. It isn't trying to reinvent the wheel in any way – it's a moderately boilerplate fantasy story about a peasant girl brought into the palace as a substitute for a dead princess in a vaguely middle eastern country. Nina is precisely who you expect her to be; she's one part sad to two parts plucky, not quite sure how her life ended up taking such a bizarre turn. Meanwhile Prince Azure, the deceased Princess Alisha's half-brother, is stoic on the surface, devoted to his work (even if that means taking a backseat to his younger half-brother), and almost certainly hiding a lot beneath the surface. We've all read this story before and can guess where it's going, but that doesn't really take away from this being an enjoyable book.

In part that's because creator Rikashi is only tinkering with the formula, not trying to reinvent it. We never meet Alisha, so we have no real sense of how much Nina is or is not like her, and that really works in the story's favor. About all we know is that Nina's only true resemblance to her is the color of her eyes, an unusual shade of blue. But since that's pretty much all anyone knows (her closest attendants presumably having died in the same carriage accident that killed the princess), Nina's biggest challenge is against her own mannerisms. No one can say that she doesn't act like the princess because basically no one at the palace has ever met her – Alisha was sent away to be trained as a priestess as a very little girl. This simple change in the established plotline of most of these types of stories allows Nina to remain focused on her personal concerns, which makes her a more distinct character than if she had to be doing more than just cleaning up her speech patterns to sound more educated than she is.

And Nina is a good character. One of her more interesting traits is that she's not openly rebellious against the strictures of her new life. Instead she seeks quiet ways around them that still show us that she's used to surviving on the streets. Her sense of fairness is also born of her experience as an orphan, meaning that she can't just sit by and watch the obnoxious queen (the king's third) denigrate Azure because she knows firsthand what it's like to be on the receiving end of someone's harsh words when you can't fight back. Azure is a bit less endearing, largely because of his intense stoicism, but by the end of the volume we can see him relaxing and opening up a bit, possibly even regretting having bought Nina in the first place after she was sold by her friend.

This may not be a revelation of a manga, but it is still worth reading. The art is clean and shows some beautiful use of detail (especially in the clothes), there's just enough intrigue to keep things moving, and Nina's a heroine it isn't hard to get behind. It doesn't reinvent its genre, but when you're good at the basics, you don't really have to, and that's where this book falls.

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Lynzee Loveridge
Rating:

Nina the Starry Bride isn't doing anything particularly original, but it's pulling off its tropes well and with excellent art to boot. The story takes place in a fictional country with Middle Eastern influences. There's significant artistic focus on the backgrounds and clothing design that feel well-researched and sumptuous. The rest of the story? Well, everyone is very pretty but the central conflict is still very much a mystery.

Our heroine is Nina, an orphan girl with distinctive eyes. Her eyes get her wound up in a case of mistaken identity as she's kidnapped in order to replace the priestess-princess after she dies in a freak accident. The priestess' half-brother is in on the ruse along with a handful of ladies-in-waiting, but otherwise no one else knows she's fake – not even the King who has seen little of his daughter since she was sequestered into religious studies. Nina isn't a fussy girl though, and the story takes on the typical pauper-to-princess story as the staff try to sand down her rough-and-tumble ways into something resembling nobility.

I wouldn't call Nina the Starry Bride a romance story, at least not yet. It's obvious that there's groundwork here to create a love triangle between herself, her “brother,” and her foreign fiancee who we haven't met yet but is rumored to be horrible. Nina though is still very much a child. She can be petulant and misbehaves like an irresponsible kid. She hasn't shown much consideration for romantic feelings at all and still yearns for the freedom of her old life – and self. The manga has some satisfying emotional work in store for it, I'd just like to have a bit more movement in the overall plot.