Most of the first volume is devoted to this contest, and it's hopefully not giving too much away to note that our heroine does best Hayama after several comic failed attempts (the best involves a bungee cord in the school gym). Enlisting the aid of Hayama's friend Tsuyashi, a bespectacled classmate who looks meek but bursts into tantrums if provoked, Sana finds a way to blackmail the former "demon child" into behaving. Once she sees him as more than a disruptive "jerk," the child actress begins to empathize with him. Both she and we learn about Hayama's scapegoat role in his family (his mother died during the boy's birth), so, naturally, Sana resolves to do something about this. Conveniently, she's acting in an upcoming TV movie about a family that parallels Hayama's (the speed with which this movie is filmed and broadcast is more than a little unbelievable, but let's ignore that). She bulls her way into the boy's home to convince his father and sister to watch the movie.

As a heroine, Sana is stubborn and impulsive, prone to malapropisms and misstatements (she regularly refers to her manager, Rei, as her "gigolo," though it's clear that she doesn't know what this means - and no one tells her until the second volume). She has an actress' flair for melodramatics and is more than a little bit spoiled besides. In a way, our little acting diva is like a younger version of the heroine from Happy Mania, only with much more self-confidence and an actual shot at some day maturing. Her kimono-wearing mother, a famous novelist, is determinedly eccentric, housing a chipmunk in her coiffure, blithely observing her daughter and only occasionally correcting her.

As in so many comic manga, the characters can turn cartoonish at a moment's notice: when Sana gets peeved, her teeth grow points; when she guzzles an energy drink on the way to the studio, steam and whistles spout from her head like she's a female Roger Rabbit. Whenever Hayama becomes closed off or non-responsive, he's rendered as a cheetah. By now, I've grown accustomed to this visual convention, which is really just a variation on those scenes in Warner Bros. cartoons when Elmer Fudd turns into a jackass after he's been led off a cliff. At times, Obana's art looks deliberately naive, in keeping with her heroine and the occasional child-like plot turns. Tokyopop rates this title as an age 13+ series, but aside from its joking references to "gigolos," the first two books seem to skew two or three years younger to me. Reading an interview with English adapter Sarah Dyer in Sequential Tart, though, I'm told that the material grows deeper as the series continues.