Ouran High School Host Club Volume 11 by Bisco Hatori

Haruhi is a girl of almost no wealth, but attends Ouran High School on the strength of her grades. When she discovered that the School had a host club, she entered, and was startled by one of the members, breaking a very expensive Vase. Because she is poor, she had no way to pay the members of the club back, except by serving as a host herself, and pretending to be a boy all the while.

Now the President of the Club, Kyoya Ohtori, has declared war on the Vice President, Suoh, the war to be held as an Athletic competition between two teams: the white and the red. Ohtori leads the white team, and Suoh the red. But with more skilled athletes on the red team, how can the white compete? Why, by undermining the will of the red team to win!

As the competition takes place, the white team appears to be winning, through the use of Ohtori's sneaky plans for undermining the other team's will to fight and concentration. But when the cheering competition begins, Suoh recites from Henry V, giving his team renewed will to win, and in the following competitions, the red team quickly make up the gap in points. Finally, it comes down to a race between the captains of each team. But who will win? Ohtori or Suoh? and what will the answer reveal about each of them and their friendship?

Then, the class trip destination is revealed: Paris, France! Suoh's mother lives in France, and the idea that he might meet with her there, or seek her out, worries his Japanese family. In the end, he decides not to go on the trip, but he's sent into a deep funk by the idea of not being able to see her. And the twins, Hikaru and Kaoru, are stunned to realize that they both like Haruhi as a girl. Given that both of them also realize that Suoh likes her as well (but doesn't see it because he's dense about his feelings) gives them their first taste of competition between themselves, and it causes a small rift between them. Can they ever get back to the relationship they enjoyed with each other before?

While Ouran High School Host club is usually inoffensive fluff, this volume shows it veering into some heavier emotional territory with the conflict between the twins, who never seem to care about anyone and play with the emotions of girls by forcing them to choose between them when a girl confesses that she likes one of them. They don't seem to be jealous of each other, and now, that is changing.

We also get to see how manipulative the President is, but also how cold and aloof. He holds himself back, but the athletic competition allows him to see that he likes competing and being in the thick of the battle; not for his family name, but for himself. Haruhi is less in the focus of this volume, and more in the background, even if both twins realize they like her as a girl. She's not the main focus of the story, the twins' emotions are.

I found this volume more interesting and gripping than the usual run of stories in this series, perhaps because of the more serious nature of the stories in this one, even though the athletic competition one is pretty silly. A good series, but this volume is not very much like the others in the series.