Stolen Heart
The different settings for the stories in this single-volume yaoi collection provide variety in approach and mood. The first and longest is a costume drama featuring two unnamed aristocrats fighting boredom. One, disguised as a masked thief, kidnaps and ravages the other, who then finds ways to meet the thief again. After their teasing, love/hate encounters, the thief downplays the victim's sexual prowess, which only eggs him on. It's likeFrom Eroica with Love, only with a more modern art style and more explicit encounters. The lush lives of these characters provide room for wide romantic fantasy, and the sketchy, suggestive storytelling allows plenty of space for reader imagination around the poetic rogue, a classic seductive ideal. The second story is a generic tale of schoolboys initiating one another into their sexual ways, but the third presents the unusual angle of love between a congressman who's being pressured to get married and his assistant, who's also his boyfriend. The unusual premise will likely make the forced separation between two characters who clearly care for each other more plausible to the reader, even if U.S. culture makes the happy ending not so realistic.(Sept.)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.