Is Kusunoki's Flunking Her High School Glow-Up Worth Reading? Review

Overview

Shizuki spent middle school as an outcast after overhearing a girl he thought was his friend mock him to her circle, and the experience left him with a genuine fear of girls going into high school. He reinvents himself anyway, works his way into a more comfortable social standing, and tries to leave the old version of himself behind. Then Kusunoki -- a former outcast herself, now one of the school's most popular students -- asks him to help her build the social confidence she still doesn't actually have. The two of them never really talked back in middle school beyond sitting near each other in the library, but something about her doesn't trigger the anxiety everyone else does.

Kusunoki's Flunking Her High School Glow-Up is a familiar "reinvented outcasts recognize each other" premise, played gently and without much urgency.

What it does well

The central dynamic between Shizuki and Kusunoki is genuinely sweet. Both characters are performing a more confident version of themselves for the world around them, and the story is careful to let their guard down specifically with each other rather than making that vulnerability a dramatic reveal -- it's quiet and incremental, which suits a story about two people who are, underneath it all, still a little scared of being seen. Shizuki's fear of girls isn't played for cheap comedy; it's treated as a real, specific response to what happened to him, which gives the manga more emotional honesty than its cute premise might suggest.

The art carries a lot of the book's charm -- clean, expressive linework that makes the characters' smaller, more awkward moments land as endearing rather than just cute set dressing. For a story about two people cautiously testing whether they can trust someone, that kind of visual warmth matters.

Where it falls short

The story is light on actual incident. Kusunoki's reasons for reinventing herself stay vague beyond hints of past bullying, and the series seems more interested in mood than in digging into what specifically happened to her the way it does with Shizuki. The reintroduced antagonist -- the girl whose comments triggered Shizuki's anxiety in the first place -- is set up with real narrative weight but hasn't done much with it yet, making her presence feel more like a promise of future conflict than an active part of the story so far.

It's a predictable read overall, hitting most of the beats you'd expect from a glow-up rom-com without many genuine surprises along the way.

Verdict

Kusunoki's Flunking Her High School Glow-Up is a gentle, sincere romance about two people who recognize the same fear in each other, carried by charming art and real emotional honesty about what Shizuki went through. It's light on plot and plays things safely predictable so far, with its most interesting conflict still mostly unrealized. Worth it if you want a sweet, low-stakes glow-up romance rather than a story driven by real tension.