Pearl Pink, Volume 2 Book

This volume is slightly better than the first. The heroine is a bit calmer and less monkey-like and obsessive. The main manga takes up only a little over half the book, and the rest is filled out with two shorts. The main story is about a girl obsessed with becoming the wife of an older teen boy because when she was a toddler, he said he'd marry her to get her to stop crying. He's almost twice her height and much more mature. Her goal in life is to become good enough for him, so not exactly a feminist book. But it's saved from being distasteful by the fact that he never acts like she isn't good enough, it's all in her head. He just treats her like a little sister.

The shorts show a common theme in the author's work of petite young girls falling for older, mature, indifferent guys. The first short is about a petite girl who falls for a really big guy, who likes her but is afraid of physically hurting her due to their size difference. The other short is about a 15-year-old girl living with her 25-year-old stepfather (he was 18 when he married her mother, who died 2 years later). They look almost identical to the characters in the main manga and were the inspiration for those characters. The dynamic between them is also very similar. It seems to be a family love, that is going to evolve into romantic love. It doesn't come across as creepy, but the concept is disturbing.