隣の席の佐藤さん

very straight forward

I first encountered 隣の席の佐藤さん from an english translation of the manga adaptation. The mange impressed me for the way it relied heavily on facial expressions in combination with internal monogogue to convey. There is also a colorized manga version. I'm not sure how much of the two novels the manga adapt or how much of the manga is availabe colorized.

This review is based on the first two volumes of the novel, with which I'm pretty sure the series is complete.

The story is a very straight forward romance story. The first volume is set entirely in high school. The second novel continues first in high school and then after graduation.

The story is very straight forward, but nice.

Something that is somewhat unique is that 佐藤さん is ... not very intelligent. There are a lot of characters in fiction that say and do stupid things for comedy. 佐藤さん isn't that kind of stupid. She is someone who tries her best and still fails all the time and is easily tricked and decieved by people. I don't know of many stories that have characters like that.

language and learning I think this is a pretty good novel for language learners. There are probably easier novels in terms of kanji, vocabulary and grammar. Especially when you also consider children books. But the story is extremly straight forward, making this novel very easy to follow relative to it's language level:

• there is only one point of view (the male protagonist 山口くん)
• there are really are only two characters. There are some class mates who say a few things, but they aren't importnat enough to remember their names.
• as far as I remember everything is told in strictly temporal order. No flashbacks or anything.

That means you'll never really get confused about who is saying what or trying to remeber a large cast of characters and their names.