It's rare to find a coming of age story which has a main character that's a fresh college graduate. Perhaps coming of age isn't the right word, but it's one of the best ways to describe this tale of a innocent girl in her early twenties trying to figure out how the world works. A college degree doesn't guarantee you a job, and Haruka finds this out the difficult way. She develops over the course of the story, maturing into an adult, all the while learning more about the intricacies of the entertainment world. She's a lovable character that seems to be relatively anchored in reality.

The art itself is well drawn, often emphasizing the face in ways that make the characters quite expressive. In turn, this helps to delve deeper into the acting that Haruka and the other characters have to do as part of their job: to sell themselves as products.

Unfortunately, this manga trips over itself once it reached the latter stages. Haruka's development, which for much of the manga takes center stage, soon becomes less and less prominent as the story focuses on alternate characters. This is fine in and of itself, but the characters that the story later focuses on are designed weakly, often seeing some development over a long period of time. A significant amount of time is spent on exposition; a volume or two toward the end is focused on background stories that could have been condensed far better than they were, and executed in a way that involved the main character more.

All in all, Haruka 17 has more merits than deficits, and was a delightful read. Though its execution and logic seem somewhat unpolished toward the end, this manga should be read by those interested in the Japanese entertainment industry and the young girls put through its trials.