By far my favourite of the series - I feel like having an older Rin makes for a better book - I get we needed to establish her younger being but this is way more entertaining and school life is hard! ( )

A letdown after the first four volumes.

It turns from a heart-warming tale of caring for an abandoning child to a humdrum, if beautifully told, high school love story. It does not help that the author had to keep the adoptive father without a proper resolution by keeping him from marrying his true love interest, resorting to stereotypical manga male indecisiveness and female reticence to extend the story.

I was hoping for a continuation of volume four, not a ten-year jump in the story. ( )

Great series, bad ending ( )

A different type of story line. Set in modern day. Nothing supernatural. ( )

I love this series quite a lot. I've said it again and again, but Unita is one of my favorite cartoon artists. I love the round-but-angular lines and the way she varies the thickness and the way she draws hands and expressions. I'm also really into her characterisations and the way she weaves a story.

Now, there are some less than awesome bits to Bunny Drop's ending I'm told, which is why a LOT of people stop at volume 4 (now that the series has finished in Japan). Because I want to support her and I want to trust that other people are just being dumb, I'm continuing on with the series, and pretending that the spoilers don't exist. But either way, this is something that I had in mind as I read volume 5, which is the start of the shift in tone/topic.

The first half of the series explores the meaning of family and growing up through Daikichi (30) and Rin (6), who are thrown together with the death of Daikichi's grandfather (Rin's father). It is super sweet and touching and I think did a fantastic job. The fourth volume has a well-done echo of the first, showing how the two have grown and grown together over the course of a year. It makes for very good closure for the series if you aren't interested in continuing on.

The second half of the series starts out almost like an entirely new one. It begins ten years after the fourth volume ends, with Rin almost 16 and in her first year of high school (which is only 3 years long, ages 15-18ish, in Japan). I'm not really sure what the themes are going to be now, though the nature of family and growing up are still prominent. There is a lot of story-time devoted to Rin and her friend Kouki, who has a crush on her though Rin only sees him as a brother (they've been close since pre-kindergarten, and Daikichi and Kouki's mom helped each other out, as they're both single parents). So I guess a lot of this second half will also be about navigating relationships as a teenager, and dating and first love and so on.

Rin and Kouki as teenagers are amazing. I love the way they're drawn, and the way Unita shows their personalities in the drawings. There are a lot of little details in the backgrounds or how characters have aged over the last 10 years that I rather like. Sometimes you get time skips in manga and everything seems the same, so it's a little too much like a plot convenience to get past the boring bits. Which, okay, that might be the case here, too, but Unita has put effort into it — and there's a bonus volume she's doing now of the time in the middle that was skipped.

I wasn't put off at all by the time skip or change to the tone of the story, but a lot of it is because as I was reading, I saw it as much as a completely new story as a continuation of the previous four volumes. It will be interesting to see if I'm still as keen on the series in the following volumes, thanks to rumors of disappointment, and suggestion from my friends that the series ends badly.

LATER EDIT:

Okay, I have now read volume 6 in the series and gone back to reread volume 5 as a refresher and my opinion has changed quite a lot. The story feels a lot more cohesive when thinking of this volume as part of the following story than as part of the previous first half of the series. The book itself is still a bit off, but when paired with volume 6, it works much better for me and I found myself enjoying the story much, much more than I did the first time through (even with the spoilers in the back of my mind!). ( )