Take one influencer and one bad boy extraordinaire, whisk in a sprinkling of sweets, a scoop of social media and you get…? Maki and Akito's love story, hot out of the oven! After all, even though Maki might have a bit of a bad rep, the guy must be just as gooey on the inside as the glorious goodies he posts all over social media. So when Akito gets a taste of how dangerously delicious his desserts are, he can't help wanting a taste of the man himself…

Yankee & Carameliser has story and art by Chiuko Umeshibu. Translation by Emma Schumacker and lettering by Oliva Osanz. Published by Yen Press (October 28, 2025). Rated M.

Bolts
Rating:

Dealing with societal expectations is never easy. Even today it feels like you are forced to engage with a specific type of media or forms of entertainment in order to conform to a specific gender norm. If you don't, then you are seen as weird or broken, inadvertently creating a troubling home environment or a difficult development process. Probably one of my favorite things about Yankee & Carameliser is how it nails that internal struggle with our main character Maki is heart dealing with in a realistic way. He's just a guy that likes other boys, but because of how that affected his family, he is scared of how other people perceive him which causes him to overcompensate and leads him to ironically be even more isolated than if he was just open about his interests. There's a lot of really good commentary there that I feel a lot of people will be able to relate to.

However, one of my biggest issues with the book is that while it is a self-contained story in this one volume, I feel like there was so much potential to delve into different elements of the setup more. I want to know more about Maki's home life, even though we can infer a good chunk of it from what we see. I want to see what happens after the end of the story with how his parents deal with his newfound acceptance about his life. There is also a social media angle to the story that gets introduced very early on as the inciting incident for what brings our two leads together. There are some moments where it feels like the story is commenting on validation and how contrasting interest can actually yield a lot of positive attention from people, but it's very surface level. Even the whole baking angle I feel like could've been explored a lot more.

Still, that's probably a good sign if my biggest complaint is that I wish there was more of what I was reading. While I do think the overall romantic wrap up towards the end came a little bit too easy, I was surprised at how heavy a lot of the conversations ended up getting. Or two leads do have chemistry, but I like how the story isn't afraid to confront the more hostile emotions that are bubbling underneath the surface due to their specific backgrounds. It does what I think a lot of romance stories should do and that's tie the individual character development of each character into that romantic crescendo. This was a solid read and I could even recommend this as a good first boys love story.

Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

Is there anything sexier than competence in the kitchen? Probably; I'm not really the best person to ask. But the idea of kitchen skill as highly desirable is baked into Yankee & Carameliser to perfection when a high school third year discovers that his delinquent classmate has a secret life as a phenomenal baker. The delinquent in question is Maki, who posts his desserts on a barebones pseudo-Twitter account. Akito stumbles upon it and plays internet sleuth to figure out that the baker is his classmate, and from there he relentlessly pursues Maki, first in an attempt to get him to allow Akito to curate a better social media account for him and later romantically.

While the plot is deceptively simple, there are some hints that Maki's delinquency isn't his natural state of being. As a child, Maki horrified his rigidly heteronormative parents by liking (gasp) cute things meant for girls. Whether or not this actually led to their divorce, Maki has always believed it did, and certainly none of his mother's brief appearances in the story do anything to prove otherwise. The result is that Maki has grown up to be terrified of presenting as anything other than strictly masculine…and that includes not engaging in supposedly “girly” pastimes like baking. Although Maki doesn't say much about it in the book itself, it's very obvious that this poor young man has been down on himself for what he believes to be his failings for a very long time.

That's the real beauty of his relationship with Akito. Akito has no such beliefs; he thinks it's awesome that Maki can bake, and he's got zero compunctions about saying it frequently and at length. While Akito is straightforwardly pursuing Maki, the other boy is shocked that Akito would want to be around him, much less like him. He's been so long without feeling loved that he doesn't know what to do when the opportunity presents itself, twisting himself in knots to try to avoid having to see that Akito genuinely likes him until Akito spells it out for him in a way he can't miss.

The pastry are lovely, but the real draw of the story is the way Akito helps Maki to believe in himself and to begin to escape the toxic ideals his parents pushed on him. It could have used a second volume to get the most out of the story, but this is still a sweet, affirming story.