Some Grade A classic shoujo manga, here. Some of it is a little dated, and as another reviewer points out, there's some age-gap stuff here that comes off a little sketchy, but it definitely sits comfortably in the classic formula.

I love 1990s shoujo manga – I grew up on it. Likewise, I adore Chie Shinohara's work, and I've always been sad that only Red River ever came out in English; both Ao no Fūin and Mizu no Sumu Hana are also excellent. That said, I also recognize that some aspects of Shinohara's works, and Red River in particular, are very much of their time and don't necessarily hold up today. So much as I love this series and am excited that it's getting a re-release, I need to say that this first omnibus is just full of sexual assault, sometimes by the romantic lead, Kail.

If you can deal with that, this is an excellent book. The story follows Yuri, a regular Japanese teenager, who is somehow targeted as a sacrifice by the queen of ancient Hattusa, a Hittite city in what is now Turkiye. Queen Nakia, who is determined to see her son, the youngest prince of the empire, on the throne, reaches through space and time to snatch Yuri into the past, where she intends to kill her. Yuri escapes from Nakia's clutches and is taken in by Kail, the third prince, who through the magic power of his tongue in her mouth grants Yuri the ability to speak the local language. Yuri is completely at sea in this B.C.E. world. She ends up posing as Kail's concubine and the avatar of the goddess Ishtar – the only way to keep Nakia's claws off of her.

The story is a time travel delight. Shinohara has done research (when I saw Hittite swords in a museum after first reading the series, I knew exactly what they were without reading the signs.) Yuri's headstrong qualities are balanced by her confusion and upset at having been wrenched away from her time. Her unsettled emotions are further thrown off by Kail himself, who is certainly not shy about how he feels about her. (At least, on a physical level.) Her new world is rife with danger to the point where there's barely room to breathe in the story, something that's particularly apparent in this omnibus compilation of the first three books in the series. Yuri is whisked from one danger to the next, with Nakia's insidious power – the control of water – inescapably around every corner. It's high drama, a war story, and a palace melodrama all in one, and it is addictive.

There are a few oddities in this book, the main one being that Yuri, who was taken from 1995, keeps saying that she's from the “twenty-first” century. Background characters are not drawn by Shinohara in an oddly apparent way, and Kail's hair is nearly a mullet, which is unfortunate. Despite being very much of its time in some ways, Red River is a story that holds up. It's intense and hard to put down, and that's true of this re-read of a story I've read many times before.

Red River is a classic. If you loved Inu Yasha or any books where the main character goes back in time and has to learn to live then this is for you!

I absolutely loved this and cannot wait to purchase a physical copy and continue this series.
Having grown up reading/watching 90s shoujo, this was such a delight. I'm honestly surprised I've not read this before. But, it should be said that this is definitely a 90s isekai shoujo, and it is important to know it is product of this time.
I'm messy and I love the high levels of drama presented, but for many there are a lot of triggering themes in this book. Honestly specific imagery and a plot point (both were gore-related) had me shocked. But I found the plot of this to be so interesting that even with it giving me a little scare, I wanted to continue forward with it.
This is something I would definitely recommend to fans of older shoujo series, but I would definitely give some trigger warnings to people who are not as familiar. The best general warning I can give is if anything in the television series Game of Thrones has made you very uncomfortable, I might steer you away from this title. A lot of the same triggers exist between the two.

I'm going to be honest, I had forgotten that I've read this before when I requested an ecopy of the omnibus from NetGalley. I was going off the excitement of a classic shojo being re-released, but as I was reading I was like "Hey wait a second. . ." So, as it happens, my teenage self definitely read a scanlated version of this as a kid. Does it hold up? No clue honestly. I like the first three volumes and I want to read the rest, but I recognize that this manga is very much of its time.

Red River is about a young girl named Yuri who gets sucked into the ancient past (think during the reign of Tutankhamen) so she can be used as a sacrifice by the evil queen to put a curse on the prince candidates of the country. Yuri gets saved from certain death by a very hot guy with a very pointy chin, no nipples, and a fast and loose concept of consent. When her friend gets murdered, Yuri vows to get revenge on the ones who killed him.

Red River felt very nostalgic for me even though several parts had me raising my eyebrows. There's definitely some inherit sexist language and imagery at play here that probably wouldn't make it to the final draft of any current manga. At its core Red River kind of feels like a Harlequin Romance novel. It has all the parts of one: virginal heroine, scantily clad women, some frankly concerning age gaps, and pseudo soft porn plotlines (looking at you "We can't sacrifice her because I deflowered her scene"). However, Red River is the unmistakable progenitor of series like Yona of the Dawn, Dawn of the Arcana, Inuyasha, The Water Dragon's Bride, and similar series.

So is it good? Eh. I had a good time. I remember eating this up as a teen. There's some genuinely beautiful panels of art in this series. The villain is dramatic and over wrought, the romance develops DEFINITELY too fast and is a little Stockholm flavored. It's more of a "I can't stop watching this. Hand me the pop corn" situation. If anything, I think if you call yourself a shojo fan, you should probably at least give Red River a try. There's also something to be said about Red River being one of the classic manga that wasn't afraid to push boundaries, even if those ideas are bit offensive in many ways. Red River is a testament to the fact that shojo is and always has been a varied genre. Someone gets skinned alive in like the second volume and that's honestly pretty metal.

Trigger warnings for sexual assault, nudity, and gore.