Is Cheeky Brat Worth Reading? Review & Where to Read

Quick facts
Format	Manga (shōjo), 138 chapters, 23 volumes
Run	2013–2021 · completed
Community score	AniList 7.6 · MangaUpdates 8.0
Where to read	Yen Press — official

Overview

Yuki Machida has spent her whole life being the responsible one - the oldest of a big family, the manager who keeps her high school's basketball club running, the person everyone leans on. Sho Naruse joins the team as a freshman with talent to match his ego, and his favorite hobby quickly becomes needling Yuki until she loses her composure. Cheeky Brat spends its first stretch playing that dynamic for comedy before slowly, patiently, letting it become something else.

What it does well

What separates this from a lot of school-romance manga is how much interior life Yuki gets. She's not just a straight-woman foil for Sho's antics - her habit of shouldering everyone's burdens is treated as a real problem the story keeps coming back to, something she has to notice and push against rather than a quirk that just makes her endearing. That gives the eventual romance actual weight: Sho isn't just chasing her, he's one of the few people who notices when she's running on empty and calls it out.

Sho himself earns more nuance than his introduction promises. He starts as pure comic-relief flirt, all lecherous one-liners and no filter, and the manga takes its time letting you see what's underneath that - without ever fully sanding down the parts of his personality that made him annoying in the first place. That balance keeps the chemistry from curdling into wish-fulfillment.

The basketball setting also does real work. The team's wins and losses matter, practice arcs give the cast group scenes outside the central couple, and the sports side of the story never feels like set dressing for the romance - it's woven into why these characters spend so much time together in the first place. And across 138 chapters, the pacing holds up better than most long-runners; there isn't much dead weight to skim through.

Where it falls short

The slow burn is, by design, slow - and eight years of serialization means the will-they-won't-they stretches on long enough that some readers will get impatient waiting for these two to just say what they mean. It's not unearned, but it does test your patience at points.

The supporting cast's own romantic subplots get comparatively rushed treatment, introduced and resolved faster than the main pairing's arc, which can make them feel like afterthoughts by comparison. And visually, this is a fairly conventional shoujo - clean, expressive, well-drawn, but not aiming to stand out stylistically from its peers.

Verdict

Cheeky Brat is a well-built, patient romance that trusts its two leads' chemistry to carry a long runtime, and it mostly earns that trust. If you like your shoujo slow-burns with real character work under the banter, this is a solid, consistent pick - just go in ready for a marathon, not a sprint.