'" Strawberry Panic, the first yuri light novel in North America, is set at Astrea Hill, where three exclusive all-girl schools converge. At St. Miator Girl''s Academy, gentle breezes scatter cherry blossoms across its lush campus. Nagisa, a normal and cheerful high school student, is stunned when she meets Shizuma, the school''s top student, whose beauty takes her breath away. When Shizuma unexpectedly reciprocates Nagisa''s feelings, both love and wacky chaos soon erupt. "'

'" For new transfer student Aoi Nagisa, St. Miator Girls'' Academy offers her the chance at a fresh start and a way to redefine herself. But these noble intentions go out the window when she catches her first glimpse of honor student Hanazono Shizuma, whose porcelain white skin and goddess-like beauty leave Nagisa speechless. It''s puppy love at first sight, but naive Nagisa is unaware that Shizuma is a serial heartbreaker who has set her sights on Nagisa herself. Will Nagisa end up as another notch on Shizuma''s belt, or does fate have other plans in store for the new couple? "'

Her name is Kusanagi Makoto, and it is up to this petite, yet charismatic girl to save the three schools from a crisis caused by the Étoile Competition. But could her sudden appearance cause a rift between Nagisa and Shizuma? Follow the whirlwind of crushes, alliances, betrayals, and secret plots in this second novel of the must-read yuri romance series--Strawberry Panic!

Strawberry Panic, the first yuri light novel in North America, is set at Astrea Hill, where three exclusive all-girl schools converge. At St. Miator Girl's Academy, gentle breezes scatter cherry blossoms across its lush campus. Nagisa, a normal and cheerful high school student, is stunned when she meets Shizuma, the school's top student, whose beauty takes her breath away. When Shizuma unexpectedly reciprocates Nagisa's feelings, both love and wacky chaos soon erupt. .

Backward Glances reveals that the passionate love one woman feels for another occupies a position of unsuspected centrality in contemporary Chinese mass cultures. By examining representations of erotic and romantic love between women in popular films, elite and pulp fiction, and television dramas, Fran Martin shows how youthful same-sex love is often framed as a universal, even ennobling, feminine experience. She argues that a temporal logic dominates depictions of female homoeroticism, and she traces that logic across texts produced and consumed in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan during the twentieth century and the early twenty-first. Attentive to both transnational cultural flows and local particularities, Martin shows how loving relations between women in mass culture are usually represented as past experiences. Adult protagonists revel in the repeated, mournful narration of their memories. Yet these portrayals do not simply or finally consign the same-sex loving woman to the past—they also cause her to reappear ceaselessly in the present. As Martin explains, memorial schoolgirl love stories are popular throughout contemporary Chinese cultures. The same-sex attracted young woman appears in both openly homophobic and proudly queer-affirmative narratives, as well as in stories whose ideological valence is less immediately clear. Martin demonstrates that the stories, television programs, and films she analyzes are not idiosyncratic depictions of marginal figures, but manifestations of a broader, mainstream cultural preoccupation. Her investigation of representations of same-sex love between women sheds new light on contemporary Chinese understandings of sex, love, gender, marriage, and the cultural ordering of human life.