*This review is spoiler free*

Taiyou no Ie is a really sweet romance manga, and its my favourite strictly romance/shoujo manga. I think a lot of this comes down to the characters and the story, while the art is just consistent throughout.

That isn't to say the art is bad. Taiyou no Ie has very clean art with very fine lines; nothing is bold or powerful and this consistent fluffiness is very fitting with the overall theme of the manga. This particularity of the art is also used to great effect to emphasize moments of sadness and give them far greater weight. Theses moments simply don't fit the art style, and this juxtaposition really helps with making readers feel genuine empathy for the characters. This whole fluffiness would also not be possible were it not for the great (and very liberal) use of screentones and panel specific shade shifts (like washed out greys or deep grey gradients). Another quality of the art is the use of the overall background shade to reflect the depth of the emotions present, or sometimes to localize a specific emotion like sadness to one character by through darker shades/gradients.

The strongest part of Taiyou no Ie is really the story, but my hands are tied in this review because I don't want to spoil any of it. Simply put, Taiyou no Ie is a story about someone finding their place in life and within their family. It is overall very sweet, but it isn't some diabetic shoujo romance where everything falls into place nicely and quickly. The story allows for genuinely interesting interactions between characters and the highlight of the story for me is the intricacy of the relationships between characters and how fragile they can seem. It feels real, and the story is the enabling factor for genuily engaging character interactions and dynamic relationship.

On the subject of the characters, Taiyou no Ie does this weird thing where you just like all of them. There isn't a situation in the story where you feel like characters have acted irrationally or even in opposition to what they believe and want. I was able to understand where they were all coming from, and that goes back to me feeling genuine empathy for characters while reading the manga. To me, it didn't feel like they where specifically serving the story, or that some were one-dimentional, static foils that only existed to make the main characters stand out. They all had their own problems and to me at least, none of them felt like 'missed opportunities' or 'wasted potential'; at the end of it, I was contempt and happy for all of them.

Taiyou no Ie struck a very specific cord with me, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it through. What kept me going on a sort of binge trance that made me complete the manga in less than week had to be the themes it explores and what kind of relationships it played around with. It just clicked with me.