[DeepL Translation - needs review] -Everyone is so envious that they want to kill someone.
A beautiful girl, Hotaru, throws herself onto the railroad tracks.
Her fleeting death creates regret and tragedy.
Three otaku girls attend a girls' school in Kyoto called a bottom high school, and have been treated as the bottom of the school caste even within the school. Then one day, a breathtakingly beautiful girl named Hotaru transfers from Tokyo. The three of them gather together in the Otaku Club...
Story follows an ethereally beautiful transfer student, whose death the story starts with, inserting herself into the lives of 3 social outcast otaku girls. It is presented like a mystery, though it isn't really. You can figure out what is going on earlier as there are some hints but fundamentally it's just a huge string of coincidences.
I think the real strength of the book is not the mystery but the depiction of the girls struggles. The otaku girls are flawed characters, who you can look at making awful choices but you also understand where they're coming from. Unfortunately the weakest character of the bunch is probably the character who is most important, besides Hotaru. She is not given much time in the book, probably so the twist is not immediately obvious. So you end up with one character in a sea of flawed ones who basically is just endlessly nice and never did anything wrong in her life.
Hotaru is also very interesting when viewed from the other girls pov, she is both kind but at the same time rather scary. In the end when we learn more about her, I thought she was kind of a ridiculous character, and I found it hard to take her attitude seriously.
The story in the last third requires a lot of suspension of disbelief, which I think is the reason of low ratings here. For the first 2/3 I would say it's genuinely good and the last third kind of turns it into "not good but entertaining".
Language level wise, I found it easy and a breeze to go through. Despite the topic, there isn't much specialized vocabulary, at least not stuff I wasn't already familiar with as a lot of things are also used by english otaku (fujoshi, yumejoshi, moe etc)