Jae-Gyu is a naïve twenty-year-old whose grandmother is no longer going to tolerate her laziness. When their home in the country is destroyed, her grandmother and mother find a new home in their small town with only room for the two of them. Jae-Gyu is sent to Seoul to live with her older brother. Not only is big city Seoul an overwhelming place for a small town girl, but Jae-Gyu also finds herself in a variety of tricky situations. She keeps running into Hee-Do, a boy she used to torment as a child, her brother is living a lifestyle way above his means, and Whie-Hwan, a mysterious young man with a violent past, keeps getting on the wrong side of Jae-Gyu’s clumsiness and bad temper. With so many bad things happening at once, romance is the last thing on Jae-Gyu’s mind, but that’s not the case for the men around her!
Sugarholic is an interesting title because it features an older main character who acts much younger. But Jae-Gyu’s innocence is adds a lot of humor to the story. It seems to soften the other characters, making them more sympathetic to her even as they wonder how she’s gotten this far in life while still being so clueless. Readers, too, will be intrigued by her as they are caught up in the whirlwind storyline. Even two volumes is not enough to get all of the characters completely introduced and the major plot points outlined. There’s a sort of controlled chaos going on in the story, where the plot is always on the edge of falling apart, but somehow still manages to hold together. There aren’t many answers in these two volumes, but the questions are interesting enough to make readers head for volume three and beyond….
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Sugarholic, vol. 1-2
Gong GooGoo
Vol. 1, ISBN: 978-0-7595-3074-4
Vol. 2, ISBN: 978-0-7595-3075-1
Yen Press, 2009
