I was able to find some unofficial fan translations for ‘Flowers are bait!’ on the site Bato.to and NovelUpdates, but I was only able to find the official release in Indonesian print. Another web novel with unexpected relationships and which is 100% free to read online in English is ‘Substitute Bride: The Mysterious Billionaire Falls For Me’. It’s a really fun novel and the relationships in it are really sweet and protective and not forced at all for dramatic purposes. The novel follows the main character as her arranged marriage kicks off and she finds love.
One has to consider not just where one is going to read a story, but also in what order its chapters are to be read. The Translator’s Table of Contents (linked from Shinkai at the top of this page) lays out chapters of Flowers are Bait in prologue, main story, and bonus sections. That they were written to be read in that particular order is crucial to appreciating several layers of symbolism which grow gradually from the protagonist’s growing realization of the true nature of the flowers he’s been using to catch girls. Getting to understand that slowly is key to his growing up and, to readers, to their getting to appreciate the central metaphor of the story. An aggregator might not care to recreate the structure for such work, though.
As far as I know there is no English release for ‘Flowers Are Bait’ yet, so you would have to read the fan translations. This wait for manhwa fans is what inspired me to start reading ‘The Dragon Duke’s Flower’ on Tapas (it’s a completed fantasy romance). The heroine is a botanist of rare magical plants, sent to a distant land to save her family. She is to marry the reclusive Dragon Duke in order to save her family from financial ruin, but in this land of dark magic, she must use her knowledge to keep herself alive. It’s a pretty unique take on the genre.
What I found most compelling about the distribution of the cure was the backdrop to the struggles of the action hero-like protagonist in the last third of the book. Instead of becoming a warrior against the Mother Bloom the main character becomes a public health official and struggles with the final challenge of trying to get a few key less-infected characters to help her put the antitoxin in the town’s water supply. In this section of the book there is a lot of tension, but it is very different from the previous sections. It is procedural in nature and in the end her victory is as much based on her knowledge of public health logistics and her ability to gain the help of her less-infected fellow townspeople as it is on her scientific knowledge of the cure for thetown’s problem. This is what makes the book so unique.
This also ties into an earlier point. While the central plot is a romance, the main message of the story is that there are many ways to find fulfillment, and being single is just as good as being in a relationship. I liked that some of the side characters ended up single but happy as well. One of the friend characters in particular had a really sweet arc where she discovered self-love and was working to advance her career, and she ended up single but happy, which was really nice to see. This story does a great job of showing a realistic world where not every character is in a romantic relationship by the end, as so many romance novels do. It’s a small thing, but a really powerful and sweet touch to this otherwise great story.
Me waiting for someone to post a link to the author’s official website or to a real interview so I can bookmark it. I trust collective human verification over any single source. So, five people in a thread verify the same name with different sources? That must be the correct name. So, I’m just here refreshing and reading. Carry on.