Popcorn Romance

    (CPM, 2003)
™ and © Central Park Media Corporation

From the heavily airbrushed cover featuring a pigtailed teen-aged girl communing with a nature full of cuddly animal friends, Popcorn Romance announces that it’s super-super-girly. With its respect for the elderly and the environment and “Youth Wants to Rock” plot, at least the main feature has more on its immediate mind than the relentless pursuit of chaste romance, but the back-up, “The Magic of Love,” lives up to every romance genre stereotype.

A faint-hearted schoolgirl receives an illusionary sense of self-esteem when she’s finally squired by the hunky heartthrob of her dreams. And, if you ever wondered if they were still making the old-fashioned style of manga in which a girl’s eye is made to look like a gigantic, sopping wet Queen Ann Lace doily, here it is again.
But all that said, it is desperately wholesome, and I’d much rather have my under-age nieces read this than watch The WB’s The O.C.

— S.A. Bennett
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