Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #310040 in Books
• Published on: 2006-08-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

Customer Reviews

I sense potential
`The Drifting Classroom' is a manga which opens well enough but is perhaps only the concept rather that the books contents that have convinced me to purchase the second volume.

The protagonist of the manga is a young 6th grader called Sho. After falling out with his mother (in what I'll admit is an effective and very sad scene, considering the circumstances) he attends school when suddenly... an earthquake. Although it's not an earthquake. The entire school ground has left Japan, leaving a huge hole in the ground, and has reappeared in a barren, deserted wasteland. What's promised next is how these people of different ages deal with the situation but more importantly, how they deal with each other.

Yet, the promise doesn't quite come true. It seems only possible that in this situation true colours would emerge. The emotions people try to hide would be unleashed and our basic savagery would emerge. The manga, at least in this volume, doesn't capture this theme too effectively. The primary example - one teacher grabs his own son and shoves a pair of scissors into his arm, all to scare and calm down the rest of the crying children. A tad melodramatic? It seemed forced and, as the warning on the front exclaims, explicit for the sake of being explicit.

Still, Sho seems interesting enough and I am looking forward to seeing the manga develop, despite not getting off to the greatest of starts. It has a lot of potential and I can only hope that such an original and engrossing premise becomes as good as it should be.