I reviewed this title for Booklist. Please see Booklist for the complete review and full feedback regarding this title.

Let me start by answering a glaring question that I found a lot of people, including myself, wondering: is Rainbow Days a Boys Love manga? Although the title and cover art may lead you to believe that it is, the truthful answer is no. There are many cute and playful ‘bromance’ moments, but the series is classified as a shōjo.

The premise of the story is following the daily life of four high school friends and their different paths in their love lives. Our main character, Natsuki, is a hopeless romantic who is desperate for love, as he’s the only one out of his friends that isn’t in a relationship. Despite giving all of his efforts towards his relationship, he gets his heart broken on Christmas Eve, but this is just the first stepping stone on his adventure down the rabbit hole of finding true love. We also get to see plenty of funny moments transpire between the boys since all of their personalities are vastly opposing.

This series is promising and has the potential to be a sweet romantic comedy, but at this time I cannot say for certain how good the Rainbow Days series will be. I will still be reading the next volume whenever it comes out, and hopefully, that will give the series more depth. My main complaint was that I found the characters to be pretty static, or lacking dimensions. To me, it seemed like they were given an archetype that they weren’t allowed to variate from, even saying some lines that were pretty boxcutter. I hope that these things will develop as the story goes on. Even though I was not blown away off the bat, I do want to see where the series goes! Rainbow Days will be published by VIZ Media on December 6th, 2022.

I’m giving this 3 because for the most part this is fun and quite sweet, at least where one of the boys is concerned and his romance is the main focus. The art is also quite cute, however I did find myself struggling to get through the volume as I was a little bored.

Then came the man hating friend who I personally felt was over the top but she said she didn’t like boys, she liked girls. For a second I got excited, hello queer rep, but then one of the boys forced a kiss on her despite that declaration and I just know they’re going to end up together.

I wanted to enjoy this book, but it was just ok. I don't know if the watermark made me missing important dialogue or if it was just too chopy for me to follow. I didn't dislike Rainbow Days, but I won't be continuing the story. Maybe I was just not the target audience.

3 stars.

This series begins with a group of boys who are trying to figure out their Christmas dates. One boy has five different girlfriends. Another boy has one girlfriend but treats her badly. The last one, our main character, has his first ever girlfriend and isn’t sure what to get her. He buys a scarf but when the girl sees it isn’t an expensive gift, she dumps him. Later that evening, he runs into a girl who gives him some tissues (he’d been crying), and he gives her the scarf. Much to his surprise he sees the mystery girl at school. He’s intrigued by her, but nervous to try dating again. Meanwhile his friends are constantly getting in his way. This book tells the story of how he is able to re-enter the world of dating.

I would recommend this for anyone who likes manga, as well as for young adult readers, and fans of cute romance stories.

A cute high school story featuring 4 guy friends as they navigate school, their friendship and girl problems. It was adorable!

I received an eARC of this title through NetGalley in return for an honest review.

I thought this was an okay start to a series. This series follows four friends and their adventures and love during high school. All four of them have completely different personalities and interests, but somehow make a friendship work.

It all starts when Natsuki goes on a date during Christmas only to be dumped for not being rich. He ends up giving the scarf he intended for his now ex to a strange girl who offers him a tissue. After that, he sees her at his school wearing the scarf and so starts his dive into figuring out who she is, and whether she intrigues him or he likes her.

The other friends have their own things going on as well. One guy is in to...naughty stuff, one guy has multiple girlfriends and does not see a problem with it, and the other friend is a gamer guy who is into "nerdy" things. I think this is an interesting dynamic. I would probably read the second volume just to see where the story goes. However, I'm not totally invested in the plot as of yet.

I really enjoyed this slice of life manga and would love to read any in the upcoming series. I did find some of the characters hard to distinguish with the black and white art, however.

Natsuki is a hopeless romantic and his three friends, who each have specific personalities and romantic interests, tease him about it. He is excited about his girlfriend and going on dates but his friends overhear her talking to her friends about how she likes how rich he is. Natsuki isn't really rich, he has nice hand me downs from his older siblings and has been spending money on the dates but is almost broke now. When his friends try and tell Natsuki what they overheard he refuses to believe it until his girlfriend takes them to an expensive restaurant and expects him to pay and scoffs at his christmas gift of a scarf. Natsuki breaks it off and is upset in a busy shopping center and gives his scarf away to a girl who seems cold. Natsuki has a crush on this girl now and discovers her at school and tries to build up the courage to ask her out.

This title was really sweet. One of Natsuki's friends is into BDSM and it's kind of inappropriate for a teen title but he brings it up like a joke just a few times so it could either be laughed off or a conversation could be had with the reader about it.

This title was just ok. Not a bad storyline I guess but for high school students rather than middle school or younger. I was given a digital ARC for my honest review of this title by NetGalley. I think I would have liked the title better had the digital copy worked right on my kindle. I could only scroll one or two pages before I would manually have to move to the next page or two so that I could read those then repeat the process. It was rather tedious but was interesting enough that I read the whole thing so it has that going for it.

Rainbow Days is that book you're reading and that you just know it would make an amazing anime. The dynamics and personality of the characters are great, it's just fun and light and playful. I really appreciated the focus mainly on the friendships. Romance is important throughout the story, but always through the lenses of being with your friends and being very young and fun. I'm looking forward to see the next volumes come out.

Such a cute manga with great representation, setting, characters. I can't wait to read the next in the series. Buying for my library.

Rainbow Days centers on a group of four high school boys, each of whom have very different habits and romantic interests. When one of the boys, Natsuki Hashiba, is dumped on Christmas Eve, he immediately falls in love with a girl named Anna Kobayakawa after she hands him a box of tissues. Once he learns that Anna also attends his high school, Natsuki starts his new pursuit of love with both the help and hindrance of his friends.

Rainbow Day’s biggest strength is the friendship dynamic between Natsuki and his three friends. While Natsuki is a romantic, this is not a mindset shared by his friends. Tomoya Matsunaga is a playboy, Keiichi Katakura is a sadist, and Tsuyoshi Naoe is an otaku. This leads to them all having drastically different approaches to how Natsuki should pursue Anna, leading to some hilarious interactions between the boys. That said, there’s a strong sense of brotherhood within the group. Natsuki’s friends genuinely want him to succeed in love, and while not all their ideas are ideal, they help Natsuki make small steps towards getting closer to Anna.

Compared to the other characters introduced in this volume, Anna is easily the most quiet and soft-spoken. She maintains a calm and neutral expression in most of her appearances, making it difficult for the reader to know how she’s truly reacting to the situations around her. That said, this also makes her moments of clear emotion far more impactful. Throughout this volume, Anna only smiles when talking to her close friend Mari and with Natsuki. This allows for Natsuki’s key moments with Anna, such as her laughing when they’re walking home from the study session, to provide a sense of development in their relationship. It will be interesting to see how Anna’s character is explored further as the story progresses.

Minami Mizuno’s artwork is solid throughout this volume. Rainbow Days’ best qualities are supported by its comedy and gag conversations, but the manga never feels visually cluttered in order to facilitate this. Mizuno’s panel composition is especially standout, making great use of the page layout to emphasize jokes. One of my favorite moments was during the end of chapter 2, where at the bottom of one page, Mari starts crying after Anna tells her that she “likes her too” and that they should eat the chocolate gifted from Natsuki, only for the next page to have Anna yell “That’s Garbage!” as a reply. It’s moments such as this that make Rainbow Days work so well as a manga, enhancing the series as a whole.

Rainbow Days is an enjoyable read that will provide you with some good laughs alongside its romance elements. The manga has some great character interactions and it’s easy to become attached to the cast thanks to their entertaining antics. If you’re looking to check out a new series, this one is off to a promising start.

Four high school friends navigate their first relationships and crushes, some with more success than others. One friend juggles five girlfriends at once; one is a dom who likes to make others feel pain; and one is a nerd who hopes to find another nerd girl to share his interests. Then, there's Natsuki, who is a hopeless romantic, and finally has his first girlfriend just in time for Christmas! His friends warn him that she might be a gold digger because he wears expensive hand-me-downs from his fashionista sisters, but Natsuki believes in the power of love. Later Natsuki tries to figure out a mysterious girl he met at an ice rink - is she aloof or just shy?

This is a mostly sweet romance, but the inclusion of one with a BDSM relationship makes this something I would shy away from putting into a high school library. The age of consent is different throughout the US (and it's usually much lower in Japan comparatively), so even though the two are consenting to the relationship, that sort of thing might be illegal in some states. This book is definitely written for teens as the primary readership, so I even wonder if adult libraries would find circulation with this title.

Sara's Rating: 5/10
Suitability Level: None

This was super cute! I love the dynamic of the friend group and Natsuki is so adorable trying to talk to his crush! Can’t wait for the next volume!

A weird mix of heartfelt, clueless zaniness, and genuine friendship. I think this will be a good limited series but it could get annoying if it gets dragged out and extended. The art was crisp and refreshing - somehow carbonated? And the characters were endearing if a little cardboard thin.

For four high school friends, there's just one thing on their minds: Girls. Four teenage boys are finding their (very different) ways through romance in high school. Each boy has a different style. From dating multiple girls at once to a more adult approach to sharing in nerdy cosplaying hobbies. Our main character, Natsuki, is a romantic at heart, but completely clueless when it comes to girls. Left broken-hearted by his gold-digging girlfriend, Natsuki turns to his friends for advice.
This mostly feels like a slice of life humor series. Natsuki has already set his sights on a new potential girlfriend, but it's sort of a slow going slapstick story. I'm not sure it's my style and it's a bit too predictable, but it's an okay read. I did find the S&M aspect of one character to be uncomfortable when applied to high school students.

High school student Natsuki Hashiba is clueless in love, not like his friends; Tomoyo Matsunaga, who has five girls on the line; and Keiichi Kurata, cheerfully into BDSM with willing partners. But innocent Hashiba finally has a girlfriend! His friends give him advice (including trying to steer him away from her when they discover she's only after fancy gifts she thinks he's good for) before all three end up dumped on Christmas.

After getting dumped, Hashiba gives the scarf he bought for his girlfriend to a girl dressed as Santa on the street, a girl who it turns out goes to his high school. This sets up the rest of the book (with the trio from the prologue joined by otaku Tsuyoshi Naoe in the first chapter) as they look for new love.

Rainbow Days turns the classic shoujo trope of of a friend-group of girls looking for romance on its ear by following a group of boys, instead. It leans heavily into character archetypes (the innocent, the player, the sexual deviant, the pop-culture fanboy, the mysterious troubled love interest, the cosplaying nerd-girl, etc.) without especially subverting any of them. This can still be a solid formula (Izumi Tsubaki gets a lot of comedic and romantic mileage out of playing character tropes against each other in Monthly Girls' Nozaki-kun, and Oresama Teacher)
but they are mostly to-type here.

The art is competent, but also very conventional (it feels a lot like the material Nozaki-kun regularly pokes fun at in its fake manga) with pretty boys, and floaty, airy framing devoid of backgrounds except when necessary to set the scene, relying heavily on screentone to set the mood. The art is a little flat, but that's not necessarily a bad thing, it just leans into visual tropes as much as it does story ones.

Storywise, some of the tropes are problematic, but not exactly unexpected. The playboy Matsunaga responds to an aggressive girl coming out as gay by kissing her, and it's implied this is a positive development. In the prologue Hashiba's friends characterize his girlfriend as "a gold digger", a term that has some negative misogynistic connotations. This manga reads like it could have come out of the '90s-'00s, which for some readers could be a selling point.

If you enjoy shojo then you will like this twist on the classic shojo title. It's told from the cute boys side and how they want girlfriends or how they are in relationship. From getting dump, and pinning for a girl it's refreshing. We follow four friends, and how different they are in hobbies and interest but still have each other back. Can't wait to see what else will happen in this series and root my boys on!

The title was a little misleading. Definitely not “rainbow days.” Maybe it’s just me, but from the description and title, I thought this would be LGBTQIA+. It is not.