Books like Phantom Dream Volume 1

This is Takaya Natsuki's first work, and I bought it entirely due to my respect for her as a storyteller/artist and my love for Fruits Basket, which is arguably her best work to date. I actually wasn't even quite certain what this series was about until I got the volume.I'd already heard ahead of time that this series wasn't as good as Fruits Basket, so I was prepared for some mediocrity going into it. And it was there. In this volume, we see that Takaya hasn't yet mastered the foreshadowing that she uses with such skill in her later works. Everything feels very simple and straightforward, and the first couple of chapters feel very episodic. Also, the heroine of the series is the typical all-loving, very accepting/forgiving, endearingly normal, not-so-bright heroine that Takaya seems to migrate towards. What makes this series unique, however, is that the heroine shares the stage almost equally with the hero. Sometimes the hero even seems to dominate, which is rare to see outside of yaoi-type shoujo and gothic/macabre shoujo. It's a refreshing change, in my opinion. And I can already see Takaya's ability to play up painful human emotion being put into play. I got sniffle-y at a couple of instances in the volume, even though the series as a whole hasn't really hooked me yet. Nevertheless, I'm confident that Takaya is going to turn out a good work, so I'll definitely be following this series.(Oh, and for Fruits Basket fans out there: there are a few pages of Chapter 126 included at the very end of the volume.)