Yuri Manga Review: A Kiss and A White Lily

The manga that I'm going to review today is A Kiss and A White Lily by Canno. I actually came across this manga while non-chalantly flipping through the recent additions to Dynasty Scans, and I have to say, this manga was a pleasant surprise to me.

First off, let me start by saying that this manga stays very true to its Tsundere tag. The manga series, though still ongoing, is at 17 Chapters on Dynasty Scan and has several pairings already, typically involving an excited partner with a tsundere partner. However, the transition and interlinks between the couples are done tastefully well by the author, that none of the couples are come across as annoying or redundant.

The foreground characters are also the first and main pairing of the series

The first pairing that the series introduced, and perhaps the main pairing in the series, is honestly not my favorite, but did well enough to capture my attention. They are the titular characters shown in the above picture, with the one on the left being Shiramine Ayaka, the primary tsundere character in this pairing. Shiramine is the typical honor student - smart, works hard and takes pride at being at the top. Guess a picture says a thousand words, so I'm just going to let the picture below speak for itself:

The other character is Kurosawa Yurine, who is a genius that the outperforms Shiramine, and basically everyone in the school in everything, without even needing to try:

Over the first chapter, the 2 characters draw closer to each other mainly through Shiramine's competitive spirit and Kurosawa's amusement. It was interesting premise since this was somewhat similar to Kare Kano (if you haven't seen this anime, its a hetero romantic, school-life story between a top female honor student and the top male honor student). Kurosawa's indifference to everything makes her genius-like abilities very likeable, coupled with how that makes Shiramine irritated, produces quite a bit of comedic moments. 

At first glance, I thought the manga would be a drawn out tsundere-type story as Shiramine sees another side of Kurosawa and etc., and I was honestly ready to pass my judgement (and maybe give up on the manga if it was going too slow) on the first chapter of the manga until I saw this at the last few pages of the FIRST chapter:

Then it's game on.

And immediately my interest was piqued and sustained.

My favorite pairing of the series is actually Senoo Mizuki (incidentally, Shiramine's cousin) and Nikaidou Moe:

These 2 remind me of the couple from Kase-san, where Mizuki who is nicknamed “prince” is actually not very princely-like, while Moe does not exactly fit into the damsel in distress stereotype. These 2 display to me a somewhat more evolving, mature side of school-life, yuri romance that is similar to Sasameki Koto. Without spoiling the manga further for you, I would say this pairing would not disappoint if you are looking for a romance similar to Sasameki Koto.

There are other pairings in the series too, namely a senpai and kouhai relationship (or should I say 2 senpai and kouhai relationships) and another pairing involving a more psychotic tsundere partner (not Mai-Hime’s Shizuru psychotic-level but still, pretty intense) and a gardening club president. All of the pairings really has their own appeal which would most likely keep you reading on, rather than skipping the pages and looking for only the main pairing.

Aside from the story and the characters, the art is, as usual, of very high quality. The characters and background are very well-drawn that I have not spotted any peculiarity at all.

Overall, I would rate the manga a solid 8/10 and recommend that you try it, if you like a good school-life yuri romance manga.