I don’t have much experience reading manga, so I’m afraid I can’t compare it to other things I’ve read. However I thought the love story was cute and it was an enjoyable read.
I definitely felt that it could have been better, though. I was missing a connection to the main character, and I felt that we learned much more about Gwyn than Azami. The story seemed to only scratch the surface of its full potential. While there was a brief discussion on some serious topics, I wish it had been discussed more and in a more eloquent way.
I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t love it, so I find myself on the fence about it. I do think I will continue the series, though, just to see what happens next.

Many thanks to NetGalley for providing me with this book for an honest review.

Breath of Flowers is a romance comic about two teenage girls falling in love. Azami, a freshman in high school, has a crush on Gwyn, the star player of the basketball team. Little does she know, Gwyn is actually a girl who has been posing as a boy in order to get a place on the team. The two begin dating and shoujo manga hijinks ensue.

I would probably enjoy this book more if I liked Azami, since she is for all intents and purposes the viewpoint character who we see much of the story through. Unfortunately, I found her quite grating and unlikeable - she gets jealous at the drop of a hat and seems very possessive, although that is probably in part due to the need to inject drama into the story. Gwyn was more bearable but I felt that her story flirted with trans issues without actually taking the plunge and going all in. That may not have been the author's intention but that is how a lot of her struggles in the first half of the book came across to me.

The art is fine, and cute at times, but proportions can be uneven at times and in a lot of panels screentones have been used in place of actual backgrounds which is a shame. The characters have a bit of "same-face syndrome" going on as well.

Ultimately, I wouldn't recommend Breath of Flowers unless you really, really need more yuri to read. The plot is unevenly paced and not that satisfying, the characters range from unlikeable to okay, and the art is just fine. There are much better manga in this genre.

This is a rather confusing manga about a girl who dresses as a boy simply so she can play basketball, as there is only a boy's team at her high school. Another girl falls in love with her, and she with her.

That is not the confusing part.

The confusing part is that even though it appear to be a story of a girl who wants to be a boy, she doesn't. All she wants is to be the type of person that Azami fell in love with. She doesn't want to stop being a boy, for fear that Azami won't love her any more.

<img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-5250" src="https://g2comm.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/breath-of-flowers.png" alt="" />

This is only the first volume, and there is of course a love triangle.

For people who love manga, they might enjoy this, but don't go into it, at least for now, thinking it really is a transgender story.

Thanks to Netgalley for making this book available for an honest review.

ARC provided via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I was scrolling through NetGalley and came across this book. It seemed like it would be a manga that I would enjoy so I downloaded it. Now with Yaoi/Yuri mangas, they can either go one of two ways. They could be really great pieces of story and art and portray a healthy relationship, or it can be problematic, fetishizing and even homophobic. Unfortunately, this book was more of the latter.

In the beginning there is a scene that is… not necessarily homophobic but it is offensive and misrepresenting gay male relationships. What happens is that the main character Azami is offered a Yaoi manga (which would depict a m/m relationship). Azami gets disgusted by this and says, “How do you expect to find the perfect man based on things like that? They aren’t a burning passion. That’s impossible! They are just fooling around with each other because they can’t… because they haven’t found the right girlfriend.” It gives the impression that Azami thinks that all gay male relationships are like this. In the next page, Azami says, “That kind of love doesn’t exist.” Now I could be misreading the entire situation, and Azami could be talking about the love in books vs reality, but I got the impression that it was more about Azami being like those gay male relationships sort of love doesn’t exist. This was the biggest problem that I had with the manga. Some people also had a problem with the trans aspect of the story with Gwyn dressing like a man.

The plot of the story was incredibly weak and too fast paced for the story not only to be plausible, but also for me as a reader to connect with the characters or become attached to the romance. I was quite disappointed with this because I really wanted to like this story. The romance occurs incredibly fast for two people who don’t really know each other. They didn’t really know each other but developed feelings from watching each other. Yet they end up confessing, kissing, and telling each other that they love each other superfast. Also, I don’t think that their relationship was healthy.

I wouldn’t recommend this manga.

I stopped reading about halfway through. The trans rep could have been handled a lot better and ultimately this wasn't my cup of tea.

The pacing of this seemed really off to me, and honestly i couldn’t finish it completely. I think they could have handled Gwen’s transgender storyline a lot better than they did. I don’t think i’ll finish this or read anymore by this author.

The idea was cute, but I wasn’t particularly drawn in to read this comic. I found it to be a bit awkwardly paced story wise, and at times hard to follow what was happening in the chapter. It was a challenge for me to read, which doesn’t happen often as someone who reads a lot of manga. The art was not bad, however, and as the reader I could tell what was going on and being expressed.