Crossroad 7
Posted: February 5, 2008 Filed under: Crossroad 2 Comments »I was sort of disappointed with this series. All the dramatic conclusions, showdowns, and points of contention I was expecting did not happen. What did happen was pretty… well, normal, I suppose, and I liked the way everyone’s emotions were played out so honestly… but boo, I want my drama. One situation I was expecting to blow up this entire series (someone finding out about Akai-sensei) never happened, and there was a lot of other stuff that could have happened… but I suppose the safe, mushy, family fun route is probably what I should have expected.
A high point in the series was the love letter Natsu wrote to Kajitsu that made up the narration for the final chapter. It was some seriously shoujo prose.
We do get a “here’s what’s happening a few years down the line” peek, and while I could have gone for an entire long chapter about that, mostly with just Kajitsu, I appreciate everything that was going on there. They showed all the characters, how they were getting along, what their jobs were, and just some really fun stuff. I thought the character development has been top notch all along, even for minor characters, so it’s nice to have some icing on the cake at the end.
There’s another, unrelated story at the end of the book that was pretty cute, too. Any story involving the second button of a school uniform tends to shoot to the top of my list.
So yes. It had a pretty addictive storyline and excellent characters. It had a slow start, but I forgive it that since it was building up its characters, and it really got going in the third volume, so it sort of paid off. I can pay it a high compliment when I say that all the characters in it act like you would expect normal people to act (at least most of the main characters do, anyway). I tore through all seven volumes once I started reading it again, but I was totally bummed by the somewhat dull, but happy, conclusion. It is sort of notable as being one of the cleanest, well-written serious shoujo series I’ve read in awhile. I feel like there are definitely better things to read, but I did love its vanilla flavor.
I agreed with a lot of your points about the ending, but I thought that keeping the student-teacher affair a secret was a very…. non-cliche thing to do. I like it. In the real world, this sort of things happen — short-term flings, one-night stands, affairs… and there’s a lot of ways an author can deal with it without going the normal ‘boyfriend-finds-out-and-drama-ensues’ route.
But yeah, Crossroad rocks! =D
That’s true, that relationship was handled pretty tastefully. It is kind of strange it wasn’t exploited for more drama, now that you mention it, and I respect the series a little more for it. Crossroads isn’t a series I think about all that often, but it really was very good. It did throw a lot of little twists into the regular formulas.