Tentai Books is back after a long hiatus, with their release of How To Melt The Ice Queen’s Heart: Volume 2. If you’ve not read the first volume yet, our review of that would be a good place to start.
Sparks of Romance
Volume one focused on Asahi and Fuyuka going from strangers to friends and opening up to each other somewhat. By the end of it, Fuyuka’s icy personality has started to melt, at least around Asahi. There was the hint of being more than friends, but that’s as far as it went. Volume two is where things start moving a little faster.
Here there’s a heavy focus on special days and spending time together, especially for the first part of the book. The previous title finished on Christmas, while this one takes us through several special days through the next few months. They’re used well to create opportunities for the relationship to develop.
I’d say volume two is more characterized by romantic moments than anything. It shows their comfortable dynamic, with moments of teasing and increasing closeness. We see Asahi in particular becoming more aware of his feelings throughout this volume. While he was in denial, it’s enjoyable to see that he’s not the typical dense protagonist.
Thawing Snow
While the slow-burn romance is always appreciated, it focuses on more than just the relationship. Volume 2 of How To Melt The Ice Queen’s Heart spends a lot of time exploring the changes in Fuyuka and her story.
She makes a commitment to be more social, which creates a chance to put her together with Asahi’s friends, the ‘obnoxious couple’. This created a few fun moments where the more energetic duo were dragging around Asahi and Fuyuka. It also creates some problems though, with issues happening at school. It skips over this quickly, using it more as a device to push the relationship along, unlike the title this light novel was inspired by which makes it a big problem.
In volume one, we met Asahi’s parents, who we see more of here. Their dynamic is quite fun too, with the overly boisterous father, and cold but loving mother. In volume two though, there’s more of a focus on Fuyuka’s family. I was glad to see this explored as some hints were dropped before, but here we get to find out a lot more about Fuyuka’s situation.
Closing The Story
Unfortunately, volume 2 is the final book of How To Melt The Ice Queen’s Heart. The series was canceled in Japan due to low sales, which is a pity. I personally enjoy it more than the similar series.
That said, volume 2 brings the story to a close well enough. The author Kakeru Takamine seemed to know it was likely to happen judging by the afterword and this book is the end of an arc. I certainly would have liked to see a third and fourth volume as originally planned to explore where Asahi and Fuyuka’s relationship goes or even a short epilogue to wrap things up, but the existing volumes work well together.
Art
Once again, there is some beautiful artwork by Ichigo Kagawa, with color ones at the front and a few grayscale ones throughout. It illustrates some of the more touching and romantic moments in the book.
Physical Books
Tentai Books always does physical copies of books in small print runs, which you can read about in our interview with them. As well as this, they offer some rather nice postcards and bookmarks.
At the time of writing, we don’t have a physical copy to review. You can see the physical for volume one in our review of that title and photos of several others in our interview with them. This section will be updated if we get a physical copy in the future.
Verdict
Volume 2 of How to Melt the Ice Queen’s Heart nicely brings an end to the story and I enjoyed seeing a lot more romantic moments between Asahi and Fuyuka here. While it could have done with a little more to wrap things up further, it was otherwise everything I wanted to see in the follow-up from the first volume.
HOW TO MELT THE ICE QUEEN’S HEART VOL.2 IS RECOMMENDED
Want to read some more light novels? How about checking out The Fruit of Evolution? Or our visual novel reviews?
Many thanks go to Tentai Books who provided a review copy of this title.
A gamer since the days of Amstrad and DOS and someone who has dabbled in a variety of professions. He enjoys a wide variety of genres, but has been focusing on visual novels and virtual reality in recent years. Head Editor of NookGaming. Follow him and the website on @NookSite.
