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.