Red River is a classic. If you loved Inu Yasha or any books where the main character goes back in time and has to learn to live then this is for you!

I absolutely loved this and cannot wait to purchase a physical copy and continue this series.
Having grown up reading/watching 90s shoujo, this was such a delight. I'm honestly surprised I've not read this before. But, it should be said that this is definitely a 90s isekai shoujo, and it is important to know it is product of this time.
I'm messy and I love the high levels of drama presented, but for many there are a lot of triggering themes in this book. Honestly specific imagery and a plot point (both were gore-related) had me shocked. But I found the plot of this to be so interesting that even with it giving me a little scare, I wanted to continue forward with it.
This is something I would definitely recommend to fans of older shoujo series, but I would definitely give some trigger warnings to people who are not as familiar. The best general warning I can give is if anything in the television series Game of Thrones has made you very uncomfortable, I might steer you away from this title. A lot of the same triggers exist between the two.

I'm going to be honest, I had forgotten that I've read this before when I requested an ecopy of the omnibus from NetGalley. I was going off the excitement of a classic shojo being re-released, but as I was reading I was like "Hey wait a second. . ." So, as it happens, my teenage self definitely read a scanlated version of this as a kid. Does it hold up? No clue honestly. I like the first three volumes and I want to read the rest, but I recognize that this manga is very much of its time.

Red River is about a young girl named Yuri who gets sucked into the ancient past (think during the reign of Tutankhamen) so she can be used as a sacrifice by the evil queen to put a curse on the prince candidates of the country. Yuri gets saved from certain death by a very hot guy with a very pointy chin, no nipples, and a fast and loose concept of consent. When her friend gets murdered, Yuri vows to get revenge on the ones who killed him.

Red River felt very nostalgic for me even though several parts had me raising my eyebrows. There's definitely some inherit sexist language and imagery at play here that probably wouldn't make it to the final draft of any current manga. At its core Red River kind of feels like a Harlequin Romance novel. It has all the parts of one: virginal heroine, scantily clad women, some frankly concerning age gaps, and pseudo soft porn plotlines (looking at you "We can't sacrifice her because I deflowered her scene"). However, Red River is the unmistakable progenitor of series like Yona of the Dawn, Dawn of the Arcana, Inuyasha, The Water Dragon's Bride, and similar series.

So is it good? Eh. I had a good time. I remember eating this up as a teen. There's some genuinely beautiful panels of art in this series. The villain is dramatic and over wrought, the romance develops DEFINITELY too fast and is a little Stockholm flavored. It's more of a "I can't stop watching this. Hand me the pop corn" situation. If anything, I think if you call yourself a shojo fan, you should probably at least give Red River a try. There's also something to be said about Red River being one of the classic manga that wasn't afraid to push boundaries, even if those ideas are bit offensive in many ways. Red River is a testament to the fact that shojo is and always has been a varied genre. Someone gets skinned alive in like the second volume and that's honestly pretty metal.

Trigger warnings for sexual assault, nudity, and gore.