Happy Hustle High, Volume 1 Book

It's been a while since I've been genuinely surprised by, and able to enjoy, a high school rom-com manga. I never knew Happy Hustle High existed (how it slipped past teen me, I'll never know, she would have been all over this) until I watched a video from DynamicDylan on YouTube and he brought it up as a series he's read and enjoyed. It sounded interesting enough and the few pages of art from the manga that he shared on-screen were fun enough that the first thing I did next was check Thriftbooks and order a copy of the first book.

High school rom-com and even just high school drama titles in manga tend to be very hit-or-miss for me these days. The majority of that is probably just due to the fact that I'm older and past that stage of life, so I cannot relate as well to it. Another part of it is that I feel like a lot of these stories tend to bleed together due to an oversaturation in the genre of the same tropes getting reused over and over again. But honestly, this first volume of Happy Hustle High feels like an actual breath of fresh air that I needed. I enjoy all these characters (and outside of the sports-loving nature, teen me would have related hardcore to our MC, Hanabi Oroza,) and I do feel like this volume managed to pack a lot into just 186 pages. The storytelling is very well-balanced and fast-paced without moving at a breakneck speed, and it took me no time at all to fall in love with it.

Will I order the next volume? I hope so, because I definitely enjoyed this one enough to want to see where the rest of the story goes.