Fans of yuri media have no doubt noticed that stories featuring wlw couples mainly seem to focus on high school aged characters; this isn’t unique to yuri (a huge amount, if not the majority, of anime/manga/light novels that are brought over in English have teenaged casts) but it does mean that an anthology like this one with entirely adult couples stands out.
And as a heads up, this volume does include sex and full frontal (female) nudity, so it’s an adult book in both meanings of the phrase.
All of the stories are quite short of course, all under 18 pages, and while nothing was really able to grab me with such a limited run time, I certainly had a few favorites. One of those favorites was “The Florist and the Wednesday Night Lady” by Amano Shuninta. It had an unconventional ending but I enjoyed the main characters and relationship partially because of that. Yoshidamaru Yu’s “Mama x Mom” was another story that wasn’t a “typical” yuri, where the set-up of two old friends living together (not in a relationship) and taking care of one women’s child felt more like a fanfic AU prompt than anything else, but again I liked the dynamic a lot and it is a fun basis for a story. “First Grown-up Love” by Ito Hachi had rather cute art, in a style that I don’t often see in manga, although the story itself was rather conventional and less interesting.
Of the stories I didn’t like, I was just plain skeeved out by Yoshimura Kana’s “Coward Queen” about two women filming an incestuous porno who appear to have some kind of history. The story is too short to really get into what their history is but one of them uses it to make the other uncomfortable as they’re filming, with at least some of the crew in on it, and frankly I would have been happier not to read that story. I also wasn’t fond of Mocchi_au_Lait’s “The Cram School Teachers” which was similar to Azumanga Daioh in both it’s simple art style and comedy, although the jokes in Azumanga Daioh landed more often for me than the “students embarrass their teachers” routine here.
Anthologies aren’t usually my speed but I do enjoy them as a way to discover creators I hadn’t encountered before. In that sense Syrup does very well in that regard. I would check out works by most of the creators here, as I believe the only one who’s work I had already read was Morinaga Milk, and I think the variety of stories about adult women in this first volume is just what some yuri fans have been clamoring for.