Alice and Mari have been separated! The evil plot of the witches comes to fruition! Also demons and cats get involved! Poor fashion choices are made! Mandrake root shows up because why the hell not, and if you thought this manga wouldn't be so topical as to tackle the ongoing struggle between Country A and Country B, well are you ever in for a surprise!Not to root for the demons, but to hell with this series。 What an unredeemable bunch of hooey。 I'm going to be very spoiler-heavy in my cranky sn Alice and Mari have been separated! The evil plot of the witches comes to fruition! Also demons and cats get involved! Poor fashion choices are made! Mandrake root shows up because why the hell not, and if you thought this manga wouldn't be so topical as to tackle the ongoing struggle between Country A and Country B, well are you ever in for a surprise!Not to root for the demons, but to hell with this series。 What an unredeemable bunch of hooey。 I'm going to be very spoiler-heavy in my cranky snarking, so bear that in mind, although I feel that's like shining the heat of the sun on a pile of diapers - I'm just illustrating how bad something that already stinks could get。Mari first has a ridiculous go-nowhere conversation with Miriam, who allegedly has a crush on Alice, but trust me, by the time this book's 50 pages in, you will have no flipping clue what Miriam even is。 She undergoes at least two transmogrifications that the book helpfully doesn't explain and what explanation we do get is absolute 'because I wanted to, so there' on the part of the author。Then Alice's friends turn out to be total trash and we're rapidly running out of anybody in the book to care about。 Mari is sequestered away, but when she needs to see Alice again, it's conveniently resolved by her passing by on the other side of a window, which makes their arduous separation feel like it was more a matter of neither of them caring enough to bother looking for one another。This story actually goes absolutely bugnuts in a way that would be funny if I hadn't paid for the privilege of reading this。 The romance is as underwritten as ever - it manages to be exactly, 'do you love me?' 'yes, I do' and 'I love you as well' just to get that plot point out of the way。 Then the grand witch plan ends as quickly as it begins, witch hunts start happening, people are selling their souls to badly drawn demons, seriously Miriam what in the hell are you wearing, missiles are flying into the school, countries are going to war because of their alphabetical affiliation, and wholesale slaughter and death by falling objects occurs。By the time Mari discovers that her actual magic power is the ability to reverse time, you might rightly believe that you should probably not care about anything that happened in the series and you'd be right because she just overwrites the whole thing (boy, where was she when this was getting published in the first place。。。)。 It's pretty impressive to wrap up your series by having all the events wind up having the gravitas of a golf match on the surface of the moon。 Were you expecting an epic climax or just somebody pressing the reset button? I hope it was the latter one。 Nothing more stirring than somebody unplugging reality and plugging it back in again。The one bright light is the way they bring back the claw game from the second volume, which was the only time the Alice and Mari relationship got any genuine development。 Otherwise I just shook my head for an entire book, which pretty much summed up my thoughts on the series as a whole。1。5 stars and I'm not rounding it up because this series just wasted my time。 It squandered whatever was left to be wrested from the classic Class-S set-up with dull characters and vague, poorly explained nonsense that drove me crazy。 Within its genre, you only have to look at what somebody like Milk Morinaga can do with a three volume series and it's just。。。 why waste your time here? I will close by giving this book the most damning review I can think of within the confines of yuri - I would rather have read another volume of Cocoon Entwined than this book。 。。。more
Arianna Thomas,
Such a cute ending!
Aly,
I’m not going to lie, there is a random lore dump in the middle that’s a little weird and confusing, but the story is so cute it makes up for it。 ❤️