Coming from a person who generally dislikes romance (as a genre), I enjoyed the anime more than I should've. I do agree with your assessment that the series actually makes you feel for the characters, and I found the...unique take on vampires to be insane enough to work out.
Good review.
"The only way to truly waste an idea is to shove it where it doesn't belong."
Beneath my manly exterior I'm actually a big sucker for romances, but only if I believe in them. Most "romance" seems to be lust + infatuation (with the ideal of the other person, or with the ideal of romance and "love" itself). That's not what Karin+Kenta is about (in fact, lust keeps them apart more than anything, because they're so guilty about it).
A brighter future for a darker age.
I think you should check out the anime. It's one of the few cases where an anime that diverges from the original work manages to be just as good as the manga. One thing I liked about the anime is that everything tied together as opposed to the manga which added way too many random characters at the last minute. Every action (including stuff that happened in character background flashbacks) had a consequence that would later affect the plot. A lot of side characters were fleshed out and the inner struggle that Karin's family faced between losing their daughter to the light and possibly turning her into a normal vampire was heart breaking. Not to mention it cut out a lot of that "will they or won't they" stuff that got pretty tiring in the manga. And the ending definitely left you feeling all warm and fuzzy inside.
I'd have to say the manga and anime are about even. The manga explains a lot of stuff that the anime has to skip (since it's only 24 episodes), but the anime had some pretty cool "Chekhov's gun/skills" moments that really impressed me.
The ending was so sad, and I'm the kind of person that gets kick's out of watching others suffer.
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Good teen vampire series with a somewhat forced ending.
NOTE: this review only addresses the manga. I've not seen the anime.
Karin is a Friendly Neighborhood Vampires series with a few twists on the typical vampire ideas (both the western/Hollywood version and the normal Japanification of them), a lot of cute and comedic moments, a serious undertone at times, and a bittersweet and somewhat downer ending.
Vampirism is often used as a sexual metaphor, and that's definitely the case here, in a manner that both manages to be pretty heavy-handed (vampires develop their vampiric abilities in puberty, among other things) and yet not obnoxious.
The titular Karin is a messed-up and easily embarrassed teenager whose personality and issues ring pretty damn true despite the fantastical origin of many of the issues, and her love interest Kenta is a more interesting, and believable, young man than many such in manga and anime; although in many respects he is the "perfect boyfriend" character, he manages to be both believably manly yet not a jerkass, sensitive yet not a pushover, nice but tough.
If there's one thing in this that kept me reading more than anything else, it's because the manga manages to make the reader care about Karin and Kenta and hope things work out for them, especially because it becomes quickly obvious that this is not going to be a story in which a happy ending will be handed them on a plate; this is serious Earn Your Happy Ending territory.
A criticism I'd have is that I think the creator forced an ending a bit sooner than the subject matter really warranted, and left quite a few subplot threads hanging in space. Some will probably hate the ending completely; I wasn't there, but I felt it was a bit arbitary and sudden. Almost felt like the kind of ending a TV show gets when it hears it's only got half a season left to tie things up before it's cancelled; it wasn't a BAD ending, per se, but it felt rushed. I wonder if it was that the creator got bored of it or the publisher got tired of it? At least it didn't just cut out in the middle and got an ending.