Ryō Ichino's Double the Trouble, Twice as Nice is, more or less, a combination of two familiar manga romance tropes: the adult who turns into a child and the hot guy pet. English-language readers will probably best remember them from Matsuri Hino's Meru Puri and Yayoi Ogawa's You're My Pet, but those aren't the only series to use them; Takako Shigematsu's Sayonara, Otokonoko, also available in French as Comme un adieu, is a particularly good example of the former. But where Shigematsu uses the trope to explore darker themes, much as Ogawa does with her series, Double the Trouble, Twice as Nice is mostly interested in being a goofy romcom.

That's by no means a put-down. In its first volume, Ichino's series is a lot of silly fun, utilizing familiar genre beats and making them enjoyable, even if they're nothing new. Heroine Yuki is saddled with two of manga's most familiar burdens: the debt dad and the terrible boyfriend. The former has scarpered and put her at risk of losing her family's house (her mother is deceased), and the latter has just dumped her. He's her boss at work, which complicates things, especially when she realizes midway through the book that he didn't dump her for another woman – she was the other woman. While we've seen both of these plot points before, their specific confluence here makes Yuki's life just awful enough in a grounded (albeit overloaded) way that they offset the supernatural aspect of the story.

That would be the boy she picks up on her way home from being dumped. She finds what looks like a five-year-old collapsed in the street near her house, and being a good human, she picks him up and brings him inside. (Her phone is out of battery, so she can't call an ambulance or the police.) She tucks him in bed, charges her phone, and goes to sleep…only to wake up next to a handsome young man. It turns out that Ren has a strange necklace that de-ages him when he takes it off, although his true form is his adult one – and he'd very much like Yuki to let him stay with her for a while. Against her better judgment, she agrees, kicking off the story proper, although everything that's been mentioned thus far is, in fact, important.

It's probably the book's greatest strength that nothing is mere window dressing. Yuki's failed relationship, her financial straits, and even her mother's death all play into the main story of her relationship with Ren. His true identity explains why he's able to help her, but the bigger issue of why he wants to remains unrevealed (although we can guess) and drives the romance…as does Yuki's desperate struggles to accept all of the wild plot twists in her own life. One of these things she might have been able to handle, but all of them are simply too much, and the poor woman spends most of the book on the verge of a breakdown as she tries to parse what's going on, both to her and around her. The only thing she seems able to grasp is that Ren is younger than her, even in his adult form. He's still an adult (well, almost; he's legal, at any rate), but she's not comfortable with their age gap, and that's what she seizes on as the thing she can object to. It's concrete, and pretty much nothing else about her situation is.

That age gap (he's eighteen to her twenty-eight) may be the death knell for some readers; although it's not horrific, going by the numbers, maturity-wise, there's a pretty big gap there. There doesn't seem to be a real reason for him still being a teenager except to let readers know how smart he is, but Ichino does do a decent job of hinting that he's that much younger through plot clues before it's revealed, with the best being when he starts to order a beer and quickly changes it to a tea. There's nothing in the story beyond some mild kissing, and Yuki does treat Ren like a younger brother or a roommate for most of the book, somewhat to his dismay. He makes no secret of his interest in her, although he's actively hiding his real identity for the majority of the volume, which hampers him somewhat.

Double the Trouble, Twice as Nice's first volume isn't anything new or deep in the romance sphere. It has its issues, but for the most part, the creator uses a variety of familiar elements to create something that's still fun, even if it's recognizable. The art is clean and clear, making the volume very easy to read, and the translation is particularly readable as well. It's a nice little brain break when you need to unwind, and I'm curious to see where it goes, even if I suspect that it's not anywhere new.