Review written after chapter 20. Minor spoilers. This has been one of my favourite romance manga ever since I've started it. I think the characters are really likeable, and feel pretty real to me. The side characters are interesting too, but they don't get much focus until they're needed for the story. I think a male main character like Aki is a breath of fresh air compared to the usual main love interest in many shoujo manga. His defining trait isn't his good looks, which is good. After the first chapter or so, it's not often mentioned how good looking he is, so I don't feel asif the MC likes him for his looks only, but rather his personality, which is good! He's also not the typical popular boy or bad boy character, and his niceness feels refreshing. He can't be expected to go around saying stuff that makes people swoon, but he makes up for it by being awkwardly cute! The only thing I see people not liking about him is that he's really reserved and doesn't express his inner feelings much (he's not the typical emotionless guy though), so you shouldn't really expect him to say anything much to move the budding relationship forward.

The female lead is also a good character. She's a hardworking, nice girl, as many female leads tend to be, but she feels more of a real character to me. She's someone I can really cheer for, and her personality(and her many nice hairstyles!) is cute and likeable. She's cheerful in a way that's fun to watch.

The relationship progresses at a good pace in my opinion, though some others might say it's too slow for their liking. The good thing is that whenever I think huge obstacles are going to pop out, they don't usually reset the relationship progress back to zero (which happens a lot in some manga I've read, it's really frustrating!). If you go in not expecting things to progress quickly, I think you'll enjoy the character interactions and slow progression.

I think the best thing about this story is that I hardly feel annoyed when reading it. There aren't many events that cause me to bang my head on the wall and scream "that's too much of a coincidence to be true!" And whenever I expect the story to proceed down an annoying path, it's usually not as bad as I think, since the storm blows over quickly. The characters do do things that cause the relationship to not progress as fast as it could, but it never feels like forced storytelling to drag out the story, but rather the characters are just being themselves. The caring, reasonable main characters make it a good read.

And of course, I believe the art is really pretty, so no complaints there!

Overall, I cannot recommend this enough. Just make sure you don't start reading expecting too much, and just enjoy the things as they come. Expectations make you impatient and enjoy the story less!