Tatoe Todokanu Ito da toshitemo
If I Could Reach You

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This story is a prequel to a manga I wish existed. Spoilers ahead.

This manga has a constant sense of weight that is hard to describe. In most stories like this, something heavy might happen to set the scene and you get the entire story of them falling in love.

This time around, the entire story is around overcoming some heavy shit, and at the end you get your relationship kinda put out there at the end. So like a reverse take.

I can't say I like this method much since cute lovey dovey romance is my preferred, but it does do well in setting up these characters ... for what could have been that story of them actually falling in love.

We get that love still, but no build up for it on one side since this whole story is coming to terms with a bunch of other heavy feelings about being in a relationship that just isn't meant to be, and dealing with feelings of damn near hopelessness that your love will never work out. It's pretty well done I think, but it's basically 35 chapters of pain with not many breaks in that pain and then some nice stuff at the end. That probably contributes to the heavy feeling I got for most of time.

I'm happy where we ended, but overall i'm just damn conflicted on how we got there.

Overall, I think this is still a pretty solid manga, and i'd like to try and go through it again without the extra worrying where it'll end up.

For now i'll leave this at a 7 and maybe come back in some time to give this another shake and see where it lands.

There's a lot that could have gone wrong with a premise about a high school girl in love with her adult step sister but I'm pleased to say that this manga is actually quite good and does not engage in anything unpleasant regarding the adult-child relationship.

This is a story about an unrequited love that cannot be realized and how the main character, Uta, deals with it. Will she move on? Will she cherish her feelings even though they hurt her? As the title suggests, the crux of the story is whether Uta's feelings will ever be understood by her step sister and if so, ... what that would mean.

We also follow the object of Uta's affection, Kaoru, as she deals with a marriage to Uta's brother that is starting to show cracks. I quite liked Kaoru. Maybe it was just because she was cute and affectionate but I also liked how the story showed the loneliness she often felt.

A lot of people thought the ending was rushed. Personally I didn't have a problem with it because the epilogue ended things satisfactorily, but I do wish the author had either done a time skip much earlier in the story or written more chapters to wrap things up. While I suppose it wouldn't fit the themes the author was exploring, I would really have liked to read an entire manga about what happens after the story ended.

The side characters, Uta's friends, are also pretty decent and get a little bit of character development of their own.

All in all I would recommend this as a yuri manga that is a little outside the norm since it's not really a will-they-won't they scenario as is the case for many romance stories.

Starts inter but then around chapter 10 when it seems like things are going to get REALLY interesting, the story cops out and drags its feet until essentially the very end of the manga. Especially because the side ship is so bland and the story lives doing that thing romance manga will do where it goes through every possible way to keep characters from actually talking I ended up barely even skimming and more just flipping through to the parts it seemed like something would be interesting until it was over. The endings not even that good, if anything it should’ve been the half way ... point to leave room for something to happen. Complete waste of time