A Business Proposal Volumes 7 and 8 Review

Do you know that giddy moment when you’re watching a rom-com and the protagonists finally fall in love with each other and start living their happy ever after? Well, it’s finally time for Taemu and Hari to get their giddy moment and start enjoying the rest of their lives together.

The end of Volume 6 showed the introduction of a new character, whom the readers had every reason to suspect was going to create trouble in the relationship between Taemu and Hari. We weren’t wrong, but the troubles were completely different to what I was expecting based on the experience I’d had thus far with this series. Suhjin Chae is an amazing woman, and while I was prepared to dislike her, I soon warmed to her.

Suhjin has known Taemu since their university days, and they worked together in the US before Suhjin joined the Korean branch as an executive director for a project. Rumours start spreading about the CEO and the director, and of course Hari’s imagination can’t help but go wild. Mixed with Taemu’s busy schedule and Suhjin’s penchant to create mischief, Hari is not having a peaceful time. She’s imagining the worst-case scenarios involving Taemu and Suhjin, but she couldn’t be further away from the truth! After all, the series needs to stick to its soap-opera tendencies.

However, Hari has grown up in these past volumes, and it doesn’t take (too) long to resolve the misunderstanding and start ‘shipping’ Suhjin with another male character. Will his love for the mischievous and strong-willed Suhjin work out?

But the biggest plot twists in this couple of volumes is not Suhjin’s arrival, but the realisation of Hari’s feelings about what she wants as the outcome in her relationship with Taemu. She has been against marriage since the beginning as that was the only thing Taemu thought about when they first met—it was the reason for their first encounter and for their fake-dating period. She doesn’t know if she’s still just a marriage partner for Taemu or if he sees her as something more. She had previously banned all talk of marriage, but now Taemu’s grandfather and their friends have reached their limit…they are tired of tiptoeing (aka bulldozing) into their relationship to make them see reason, so now they take the matter into their own hands.

This is the push that Hari needed, and once she finally has a plan in place, another director in their company decides to play dirty to get back at Taemu. Well, too bad for him, Hari won’t let her plan derail…she just has to adjust it slightly and end it as a public proposal. Well, go big or go home, am I right? After all, it wouldn’t be Hari’s style for things to go her way.

Volume 8 is quite fast-paced, so we go from a proposal, to wedding preparations and then a honeymoon pretty quickly, and the readers might think that’s the end of it. However, it seems that we are wrong, as the author decided that wasn’t the ending of their story, and we get two more volumes. Although a metaphorical bomb is dropped in this volume, I would have been happy for Volume 8 to be the end as our protagonists and their friends have reached a happy ending. What more could they want? I wonder, though, if the next volumes will be in a similar vein as My Gently Raised Beast, where after the end we get more volumes full of side stories. There’s only one way to find out…

I’ve enjoyed the story so far, and although the soap-opera style has made it a bit clichéd—readers knew that Hari would never have an easy time for anything in her love life and they could guess what would happen next—I found the story heart-warming and cute. Both Taemu and Hari have grown as people in these eight volumes, and although they are not perfect, they’ve worked on themselves to make their relationship a success.

A Business Proposal is written by Haehwa, illustrated by NARAK and adapted by Perilla. It was published as a webcomic on Tapas, and it is now released in print and digital versions in English by Ize Press. It was adapted into a K-drama available on Netflix, and the final two volumes of the series are already out.

Our review copy for Volume 7 was supplied by Ize Press.