This review includes minor spoilers.
Review:
The emperor has sent Prince Jing to the western border to prove himself by dealing with the bandit problem. Naturally, Li Yu, his boyfriend (and favorite fish), comes with him.
With a little (really little - seriously, Prince Jing does all of the actual work) help from Li Yu, Prince Jing more than proves himself, to the point that, despite his muteness, he gains even more favor with the emperor. Things also progress to the next level in Prince Jing and Li Yu's relationship, which leads to some...complications.
Meanwhile, the sixth prince is still scheming from the shadows but rapidly running out of options.
This series is basically fluffy cotton candy for the brain. As long as Li Yu sticks with Prince Jing and trusts in his abilities, nothing could ever go very wrong. The few times things do get a bit more dangerous, it's because Li Yu makes the mistake of not just sitting back and letting his boyfriend take care of everything.
It would be enough to make me gag, except it's such a light and easy read where it's nice to see the bad guys casually get stomped into bewildered pulp. Plus, while Li Yu isn't completely naive, if truly bad things happened to him it'd be like seeing someone kick a puppy.
My biggest issue with Seven Seas' danmei releases is that it can be hard to predict what you're going to get before you start them, both tonally and in terms of heat levels. In this volume, Prince Jing and Li Yu finally have sex. Once they get started, it's fairly frequent, but it's never explicitly described. That said, things somehow still get a bit kinky. At one point, for example, Li Yu gets the ability to transform into a merman, and he and Prince Jing decide to see if they can, ahem, make it work. (They absolutely can, but it isn't described in enough, or any, detail for me to explain how.)
This volume also introduces a few children (yes, plural). For the most part, they were an opportunity for the adults around them to gush over them. Prince Jing turned out to be a very sweet father. Kids in fiction are hit or miss for me, and mostly these ones were ok. The author absolutely did not shy away from the fact that kids are gross, though. I think I was supposed to find all the drooling and slobbering to be cute. ::shudder::
All in all, I'm really looking forward to reading the next book, the final one in the series.
Extras:
A couple color illustrations, black and white illustrations throughout, a few cultural footnotes, a glossary, and an appendix with character names and very brief descriptions and a pronunciation guide.
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