It seems to be a universal truth that middle school is hell. Even if you were one of the lucky ones who came through relatively unscathed, the middle grades are a time when everyone is trying to sort out themselves while suffering under the slings and arrows of adolescence and puberty, and that doesn't make for great times. Honey Lemon Soda understands this, and not just in that its heroine was bullied throughout her middle school years; the secondary characters also clearly have their own baggage. The story is less about tossing that baggage away, and more about better learning to cope with it as you move forward – or at least that's how it seems from this first volume.

The main character is Uka Ishimori, who spent middle school being teased for her lack of social skills and shy demeanor. “Teased” is actually too soft a word; it's clear from what we see in the brief encounters with old classmates within the volume that she was relentlessly bullied, although it seems possible that it started out more as teasing. It's a fine line for many middle schoolers, and in her nickname “Rocky,” taken from a character in her last name meaning “stone,” we can see how things might have started out on the milder side before spiraling out of control. And they certainly were out of control by the time she graduated: former classmates she bumps into on the street tell their new high school friends that she was the kid who always got bullied, and the presence of several of her antagonists at her new school and their actions absolutely suggest that things got progressively worse for her as the years went on.

By the time we meet her, Uka has built for herself a shell so thick that she can't break free from it on her own. It's a very real behavior that many bullied kids adopt, and her desire to come out of it is stymied by her learned belief that she doesn't deserve the kind behavior or positive attention of her classmates. She always assumes that when an invitation is extended to the people around her she is not included, and when someone says something kind to her, or even just greets her, she never believes that they're actually directing their remarks to her. Similarly, she takes any and every negative comment to heart, even if they're not actually intended for her. It's brutally familiar, and that can make this a tough read, even as it works with the wish-fulfillment angle of her finally having found people who were willing to give her a chance.

Because this is a romance manga, the main organizer of those people is the popular boy in class, Kai Miura. He's one of the mainstays of that inevitable group of popular kids that every class seems to have, in this case a group made up of two other boys and a girl. They actually meet before the school year starts; when some of her bullies knock her papers to the ground on the street, Kai's the only person to stop and help the crying girl on the ground. When he tells her which high school he is going to apply to, Uka makes the decision to go there too; in all fairness, it was a school that she wanted to attend in the first place. But his presence and willingness to help her in that moment of vulnerability makes it even more appealing, and that he ends up in her homeroom feels like the sort of good luck that she can't allow herself to believe.

In a nice twist on the formula, Kai isn't anything more than who he is: a fifteen-year-old boy. That means that while he has good intentions and tries to be nice to her and encourage others to do the same, he's still stuck in the social hierarchy that makes up a high school class, and he isn't unfailingly charming to her. Just like Uka, Kai's trying to navigate the shark-infested waters of school, and that often means looking out for himself and following the social rules that he needs to rather than just throwing himself into her defense. That makes him feel a lot more human than a lot of high school romance love interests, and while there is still an unmistakable wish-fulfillment aspect to the story, it doesn't necessarily have that Prince Charming quality that so many of them do. Uka has a lot to work through on her own, and while having support and friends will help her with that, the change ultimately still needs to happen as she works through things that no one can help her with. It's a bittersweet process, as we start to see in this volume, and the title really works for the story in that sense: it has the astringent sting of lemon with the promise of sweetness from the honey, as Uka's hopes rise up like carbonation in a soda bottle. And of course, as we see a couple of times in this volume, if you shake a carbonated beverage, it will explode.

Honey Lemon Soda feels like the start of a series that balances wish fulfillment with something a little bit more grounded. It still has plenty of the hallmarks of a Ribon manga, and the art is certainly typical of the magazine's offerings without much to set it apart. But it gives us a heroine it is easy to root for and a hero who's no one's knight in shining armor, but a person in his own right with his own issues. It's the sort of shoujo manga that reminds you why you started reading it in the first place.