After her divorced parents remarry, Yui returns to her hometown for the first time in eight years. She has not seen her older brother, Hayato, during that time, so she is amazed to see how popular and grown up he has become. She also bumps into her childhood friend, Ritsu, who she remembers as a crybaby, and almost doesn't recognize him. Now living with her brother again, she can't help but notice her heart fluttering with each interaction. Does this mean she might like him?! Knowing how taboo these thoughts are, Ritsu suggests he and Yui date as a way to nip her feelings for Hayato in the bud. Yet this family tree may not actually be as simple as it seems…

Love Out on a Limb has a story and art by Yōko Nogiri. English translation is done by Alethea & Athena Nibley and lettering by Michael Martin. Published by Kodansha USA (April 7, 2026). Rated T.

Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

I normally love Yōko Nogiri's work. She has a real talent for taking basic storybeats and plot points and making them feel new again within the realm of shoujo manga. So it really pains me to rate this book so low, even though I know that into every good author's life, some stinkers must fall. And Love Out on a Limb isn't truly terrible – it just isn't very good, either.

Part of the problem is that this is an incest story. (Or at least it wants you to think it's an incest story. No one will be surprised by the final page “revelation.”) Yui has been living apart from her father and brother for eight years, ever since her parents got divorced. They reconnected and reconciled, though, so Yui and her mom are moving back into the family home. The only fly in the ointment is that Yui's suddenly got a crush on her brother Hayato. She knows it's wrong and she does take steps to get over it, more or less, but it all just feels so stale in a way that Nogiri's plots often don't. Maybe that's a me issue when it comes to incest as a plot device. I'm willing to consider it.

I'm more inclined to lay the blame at the foot of the character writing, though. Yui and Hayato are severely lacking in the personality department, and the third point on their love triangle, Yui's childhood friend Ritsu, can't quite carry the whole book. He's at least more interesting, if only because he's clearly playing his own game with the siblings. He may very well be in love with Yui, or he might just think it'd be fun to pretend to date her to needle Hayato, who seems to reciprocate his sister's crush. There's just something inherently untrustworthy about Ritsu that at least makes him more interesting than the other two, albeit not enough to carry the story.

On the plus side, I still like Nogiri's art. It's simple and attractive, and it's never hard to tell the characters apart, which is always a bonus. Pages are formatted for maximum ease of reading and she does a very nice job with body language in particular, which is very needed in scenes between Hayato and Yui. But it's not enough to make up for the bland plot, stale “twists,” and generally unappealing story. Consider me a very sad Yōko Nogiri fan.

Erica Friedman
Rating:

Right from the cover, you can see that you're getting in to a love triangle, but it's the Table of Contents that indicated that the competition for Yui's affection will be between a childhood friend and her older brother, both of whom she hasn't seen in eight years.

This is me making my polite face. I've long been on record that falling in love with a sibling seems the absolutely laziest want to approach life. Seriously, you can't even leave the house? Nonetheless, I went into this book wondering if, maybe, there was something original and interesting ahead for this extremely threadbare plot.

The answer is…no. Every beat here has been done, many times. As the main story comes to a close, it reaches for yet another over-used plot complication as a cliffhanger, one that is telegraphed so heavily there was almost no doubt that that was where we were headed from the beginning.

The bonus chapter is a little less excruciating, thankfully, so even without knowing the characters, we can enjoy the scenario.

I found this whole volume frustratingly banal, just a couple of tired shoujo tropes thrown into a blender, not mixed well, with no particular flavor. I, vainly, hoped for something, anything, original here. That said, if “illicit love for your older brother” or “slightly problematic shoujo love triangles” is absolutely your jam, then you're much more likely than I to enjoy this story.

Bolts
Rating:

This story frustrated me. However, I don't know if it frustrated me because it took the coward's way when it came to introducing an admittedly controversial setup, or if I'm frustrated that the story wants to play with this setup at all. Raise your hand if you like love triangles. Now raise your hand if you like love triangles that involve incest. Do you see what the problem is? Love Out on a Limb is about a young girl who reunites with her older brother after being separated for a while, and she just can't help that she really loves him more than probably a little sister should. Noticing this, their childhood friend says that she should pretend to be in a relationship with him so that her older brother doesn't get suspicious, because she knows that if she becomes honest about these feelings, then they could tear their family apart, since incest is understandably not cool.

I hate this setup because, outside of the really lazy incest setup, it really frames all the relationships in an uncomfortable position that the story just plays completely straight. There's no real reason that the main character has feelings for her older brother outside of the fact that she just hasn't seen him in a while, and he's conventionally attractive. I feel bad for the childhood friend initially because he's in that unfortunate narrative position where it feels like he's doomed to lose the romantic battle. But I also don't feel bad because he is sort of manipulating the lead into this relationship under pretenses. Then the story has the gall to tease the whole “they're not really siblings” angle, which is really dumb because that just creates a legal excuse for the love triangle to exist in the first place, even though everybody still believes that they are siblings.

If the manga wanted to tell a taboo story with all the problems and hurdles that such an idea would present, then I would actually be OK with that. I believe that you can tell a story featuring taboo and problematic subject matter as long as you're actually willing to talk about that with a fair shake. But this story doesn't even have the balls to try that. It's just a really big mess of problematic setups and characters that I can't even really feel bad for because I don't understand why they feel the way that they do. It's almost like an attempt to be edgy with the incest angle, which ended up ironically making the story feel really bland and generic. This is about setting up dynamics that don't really have any major bite to them, and I'm not invested enough in any of the characters to want to realistically see where this drama ends up going. Plus, this is a bait and switch that's been done a million times before in millions of other shows for better and for worse. I would say that you're not missing much by skipping this because it definitely doesn't seem to be promising anything beyond what you would typically expect.