[Thanks to Kodansha and Netgalley for a copy of this book in exchange for an unbiased review.]

Mona rules her school through sheer sex appeal, but Kuroiwa, the new guy, is impervious to her charms (finally, a manga with a title as straight ahead as a light novel). Except he’s not and she’s not in return and things are going to get wild. Or dumb.

This book starts off with a bang, as Mona is a hell of a confident high school sexpot (the mangaka worked on her design and it shows) and watching her basically sing her own theme song coming into the building and just succeed her way through it all is pretty fun.

Then the seductive force meets the unseduceable object, in the form of Kuroiwa, and Mona embarks on a campaign of terror, using every possible move a hot-blooded reader would want to try and make him fall for her, since her popularity apparently requires her to catch ‘em all, like thirsty Pokémon.

Honestly, this is probably the book at its funniest. There’s something rather brazen, in a good way, about a heroine who literally rips the front of her shirt off to reveal her bra and has perfected the ‘accidental’ panty flash, as if she’s learned all her tricks from years studying tropes in shonen manga.

The longer it draws the gag out, the less funny it becomes, partly because Kuroiwa is really dull. The reason for his apparent disinterest is that he’s training to be a monk and this apparently precludes him from worldly desires, so he’s slowly going insane on the inside.

Which makes him an inert lump on the outside. The author kind of tries to sneak around this by having the other students going into meltdowns over all Mona’s antics, but it makes this face-off completely uneven, having Mona as this huge pile of emoting while he stands there and takes it.

Things get a bit more tangled with the introduction of the third character, a girl in our leads’ class, who manages to misunderstand things (well, not really, Mona says she has no feelings for Kuroiwa, but that’s clearly a bit of a lie) and be misunderstood in return.

At this point, everybody is being as stupid as is humanly possible to make things funny, which rarely works. I can see this being somebody’s cup of tea, but I felt the returns diminished hard after the first couple chapters.

Still, Mona’s kind of better than this book deserves, despite kind of being awful. The way her Osaka accent slips out when she’s flustered, her infinite store of schemes, that library scene where she basically conjures a fetish from thin air? She’s literally all the fun of this story. She really needs somebody better to play off of.

3 stars - it’s an okay book and almost worth the whole thing just for how silly/clever the first part is. I might grab the second volume and see if they bother to expand anybody else enough to come even close to Mona. Not bad, but definitely not great.

This is definitely a funny manga. Queen bee Mona doesn't understand why the new kid, Medaka, doesn't like her. She flirts with him all the time, and he never responds well.

If you look too deeply into this you'll question the way Mona is portrayed, and the choice of a high school setting. But, on the surface level it's a funny manga with an enjoyable protagonist. (I specifically loved the line in the beginning where she mentioned that she has a great personality and then in parenthesis (on the surface!)

I especially enjoyed the contrast between her and Medaka. Haruno is also a good character to add to the mix.

I'm looking forward to the next.

Basically about a popular girl trying to woo plain guy who’s an anti-simp on anything she does. That’s basically it lol..

Btw thanks Netgalley and Kodansa for giving me the first volume to check out!