5 Seconds Before a Witch Falls in Love is more or less a short story collection. I say “more or less” because in actuality, three of the four pieces in Zeniko Sumiya's first book are actually about the same group of people, but they're broken up by the inclusion of an unrelated story in the middle of the volume. It's not a great decision, really, because although they were published in the chronological order they're presented in, it makes Meg and Lilith's story unnecessarily choppy; a smoother reading experience would have been to put the demon harem tale at the very end, after all of the Meg and Lilith content. On the other hand, if my chief complaint is about the organization of the book, that's an indication that the stories themselves are pretty good.

Simply put, this book is adorable. There's a real charm to most of the stories in it no matter who they're about, but it doesn't overtake the plots to the point where they become gooey messes. This is especially true of the Meg and Lilith tales. There's an enemies-to-lovers element, but it isn't overwhelming. Yes, Meg's a witch while Lilith is a witch hunter, making them natural enemies, but Meg never really does anything that merits being hunted. Her spells are mostly in the “minor annoyances” category – making fish walk, transforming people into animals temporarily, that sort of thing. At first she's annoyed that Lilith seems so set on capturing her, because when you consider the things she could be doing as a powerful, nine hundred-year-old sorceress, her actual actions aren't that bad. Yes, being turned into a frog or a cat could be a problem for the transformed, but we see first hand that Meg always builds in a curse-breaking element – after all, the guy she turned into a frog is perfectly human when we meet him, and he is a housebreaking thief, so it's not like her punishment was out of spite.

Of course, it's the curse-breaker that's almost a deal-breaker for Lilith. When Meg transforms her into a cat, she gleefully informs the hunter that the only way to lift the curse is one familiar to us from Disneyfied fairy tales: a kiss. But the kiss apparently has to be with the caster, so Lilith would have to smooch Meg, something she's vastly embarrassed to do. Not that Meg is one hundred percent okay with it either; in fact, she's not quite sure why she made that the condition. It takes an outsider, local pharmacist Hachi, to point out that if she set things up so that Lilith has to kiss her, maybe she wants Lilith to kiss her…because she might be in love with the other woman.

While Meg isn't entirely happy about this, having avoided falling for someone for centuries, she does eventually accept the idea. Lilith is a harder sell, and in the second story about the pair she becomes convinced that Meg has cast a love spell on her. Hachi once again is happy to hand out unsolicited romantic advice, but Lilith never even entertained the idea of falling for another woman, which is possibly a marker of how much younger than Meg she is – Meg's had a lot of time to realize that there's more than one way to be attracted to someone and more than one type of person to be attracted to. It's not particularly creative that it takes a threat to the other woman in both stories to force their awakenings to their own feelings, and that does take a bit of a toll on the volume in general. Presumably the idea was that the danger of losing their loved one forces a realization in them, but it would have been nice to see Sumiya vary the plot a bit more than she does.

That holds true for the one chapter in the volume that's not about the title characters. In that tale, high school girl Kanna has the ability to see supernatural beings, and when she saved a fallen angel named Samael and a demon named Belphagor in middle school, both women fell in love with her, mistaking her kindness for romantic affection. Now, a few years later, all three are living together at Kanna's parent-free home, with Samael and Belphagor regularly professing their love for a very neutral Kanna. Kanna's unfailing kindness to the supernatural only she can see does eventually get her into trouble when a third demon shows up and also falls for her, and it is this threat that makes the other two step up their game a bit, although in all fairness, they were much more open in their affections than Meg or Lilith are ever likely to be. What's interesting about this story is that it runs like a more typical shounen harem story rather than a reverse harem or a specifically yuri one. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it is a bit unexpected and it may not work for all readers, especially since it lacks some of what makes the Meg and Lilith stories so nice, specifically negotiating ideas of consent. (Meg apologizes for kissing Lilith without her express permission, for example.)

On the whole, 5 Seconds Before a Witch Falls in Love is a pleasant read. It's short – just a bit over 130 pages – and its organization isn't perfect, but its core concepts are fun and Sumiya's art is attractive, looking like something out of a classic shoujo magazine in its character designs and backgrounds. It is, as I said before, really very adorable, and there are many worse things for romances to be.