This book takes the yaoi equation rape=love to a new confusing level, but in a cute way.

Featuring a super cute story and lovely character personalities, Love Recipe takes stereotypical yaoi to a level. It features the classic clueless and confused uke and common rape=love equation. It is actually so blatant in the story that it makes you look twice because at first it seems like a dream. However, it does not take an angst-y turn. The fact that it was rape is actually completely ignored, even by the uke.

Putting all this aside, the story is cute and for once we actually see a particularly competent uke and some real world application of logic (though obviously not all the time). I guess that's what you get from a book about a yaoi manga artist. ( )

Love Recipe is about an innocent new manga editor who ends up in the Boys' Love department and and is sent to retrieve a script from a BL mangaka who (ghasp!) turns out to be a guy. The mangaka finds the new editor to be quite 'moe,' and proceeds to convince the editor he needs to have sex with him for inspiration to finish his script. The editor then finds to his dismay that the mangaka is requesting his help more and more often.

And things pretty much continue how you'd expect. As you can probably tell, this manga pretty much throws psychological believability to the winds (I need to rape you for inspiration? ...It's not the best pickup line I've heard, but fine. But someone actually saying 'Ok'?), as you can tell most clearly by the uke who, if he had any fewer brain cells, would probably be some sort of cactus. But this manga doesn't want to be believable, and I'm not even sure if it wants to be romantic even. At it's best (which I mean quite relatively), this manga just wants to be a zany and possibly sexy good time. The uke regularly grows bunny ears and blushes and girls all around scream 'moeeee!' So if you like silly and light, you might like this.

For the more serious turns, the manga takes place in the BL publishing world, and actually does use it as a little more than a backdrop and tries to get into some more specific stuff about the job of a manga editor, sometimes. But when it gets into these things it comes most often in the form of boring little digressions on things like kinds of editors (without saying what exactly they do), or saying things like “There are a lot of things to do even after the manga is finished.” There's not enough detail to be of any interest, and it doesn't give a feel for the job at all. It does at one point deal with the 'straight' editor trying to understand and judge yaoi, which I'm sure could be interesting if done well, but of course, it ends up being a silly unbelievable turn-around with him by the end calling the yaoi “all wonderful and touching!”

I really like humor with my romance, but the kind that's just silly without much intelligence or wit or at least some 'wow that's bizarre' factor just don't do it for me. The characters are of little interest, and the information on the BL publishing industry rather banal. If you like silly humor you might add a star, but I got pretty much no enjoyment out of reading this. ( )

I really enjoyed this manga because it is light and funny. Not full of constant angst, yet not totally silly ridiculous either. But most of all it's funny for its constant inspection of its own genre - it's a yaoi manga about the creation of yaoi manga, after all. There are lots of conversation on just what makes a good yaoi manga - the plausibility of certain plots, and what kind of a character is 'moe'. A particularly funny scene even explores just what fonts are appropriate during sex scenes. ( )