<i>A huge thank you to NetGalley for letting me read this eARC in exchange for an honest review.</i>

I am so sad. I had such high hopes for this one, but it has sadly let me down. Putting aside the terrible formatting of the eARC, which made it near impossible to read at times, the story was just confusing. On top of that there was a lot of talking and thinking, and it kept going nowhere; just round and round in circles. I love emotions in my stories, but this seemed excessive and convoluted. I have since found out this manga falls into the category of 'boy love', written by women for women, and that matches my thoughts of 'this sounds like a woman trying her very best to write a gay man'.

It's full of stereotypes about both girls and boys, and the fourth wall breaking was just very annoying. Still, there were some amazing quotes in there, that I have written down.

It was very hard to connect to these characters, and the ending really doesn't make me want to read on. This one wasn't for me, sadly.

I love the premise here and enjoyed what I read: there are some really nice moments in this volume and the promise of some great character interactions and development to come. Unfortunately I was unable to fully read the volume because of the format of the review copy: a section at the bottom of each page is cropped off (no amount of changing size formatting was able to display it). I was able to follow along for a while, but this really became a problem as the story progressed and it was clear that I was missing out on some important dialogue.

I'm so happy I could read this wonderfully moving story. It's really sweet and more about friendship than romance. The main character and a supporting character are coming to terms with their sexuality and dealing with the homophobia around them, though often subtle and from various sources.

Cw for homophobia, sexual harassment and outing (nothing explicit)

It's seems to be a series as opposed to a single volume so nothing is really satisfying resolved yet. It was still enjoyable!