The Queen's Knight

Rating:
Summary: Er...what?
Review: I...had very little idea of what was going on. The book has an interesting premise to be sure, but I was hoping there would be more fantasy and less real world stuff. Her brothers are amusing, but as stated somewhere else, it's hard to tell one from the other.

Rating:
Summary: Gets better in vol 2
Review: Ok, the first volume has terrible dialogue translations. Don't bother to more than skim through it and don't let it fool you! The second volume is MUCH better and the story actually gets interesting, with less time in the real world.

Firstly, I don't know what happened to the dialogue translations in the first volume, but whatever it was they fixed it in the second. It's actually interesting.

Although it originally seemed like the series would take place mostly in the real world, it's now apparent that we are going to be spending most of our time in Phantasma. This is a good thing since there are tons of school oriented stories out there already.

The female lead is starting to show some signs of actual independence which is a nice suprise as early as volume 2. Yes, she's still a self-absorbed slow little brat, but she's getting over it.

Over all, this is an interesting series with promise and a number of volumes before the end. I would recomend all manga/manwah fans take a look at volume 2 before coming to any conclusions.

Rating:
Summary: Book -- great. Adaptation -- awful!!!
Review: This has got to be the worst adaptation Tokyopop has ever done. It's like they just took the incredibly dry, long-winded, dull-as-dirt literal translation and slapped a couple of "so cools" in it. Thanks for ruining what could have been a really great experience, TP!!

The artwork is adorable. QK is a modern-day fairy tale about a teenage girl in desperate need of someone who can defend her against the viscious attacks of other girls -- or maybe give her the courage to defend herself. A mysterious knight appears only in her dreams, adding to her already weighty troubles by claiming she is his queen and must come to Germany to be ruler of Phantasma. Near the end of the first volume, something terrible happens to the knight -- leaving the reader in suspense about whether or not the heroine will ever meet him in person, or if he's even still alive.

If you can stomach such a dreary adaptation, I highly recommend reading the first volume (try checking it out of the library) to see if you like the lovely art and the very charming story.

Rating:
Summary: Misleading and Disappointing
Review: This Korean manhwa has beautiful quality art. Unfortunately that's the only compliment I can give it. From the image on the cover and cover blurb you're led to believe that this is going to be a medieval fantasy, but it's a story about a Korean school-girl named Yuna and the ups and downs she faces in her every day life. There are a lot of things that make even this straight-forward concept difficult to follow. She has three brothers who can only be told apart by their hairstyles, and one of them wears a different wig every time we see him. Yuna has a weakly portrayed love-interest named Kahyun who has been ditching her since they first met in a foriegn country. He decides to date one of her friends instead of her. I think this was meant to stir the readers but it left me flat. In the entire 193 page manhwa there are 5-7 pages dealing with what should be the main premise. This involves some magical knight finding her when she's injured, and although he clearly found her unattractive and annoying (he calls her masculine and bothersome), he decides to make her his queen and the queen of his mystical land. The discombobulation of the writing makes me think the author was trying to either convey a personal complex period in her own life and mix it with a farfetched side story; or that this is an adaption of a novel that just couldn't be properly done as a visual story.