時間割男子 1 わたしのテストは命がけ!

It’s cute

I picked up this book because of the absurd premise—after being heartlessly thrown in the trash, four textbooks come to life to help 5th grader Hanamaru Madoka study. I was expecting it to be funny, a little bit ridiculous, and self aware (similar to a gag manga). However, I was surprised to find it is written very sincerely and played oddly straight. If you’re looking for a light/comfy children’s book, I think you’ll enjoy this. However, if the appeal of the book is the absurdity of the premise, it really only leans into that for the first quarter of the book. After that, I felt like the four main boys could have just as easily been four classmates who happen to excel at one subject.

Light and silly children’s novel

I listened to the audiobook version of this. The audiobook is slightly lower quality than some others; you can tell when the narrator has started a new session, that kind of thing. Sometimes this confused me because I thought it was a new character speaking. It’s also a single narrator, not fully voiced.

Story wise, I found the concept of the textbook boys to be really funny so I enjoyed myself the whole time I listened to this book. This first book is pretty much what it says on the tin; the boys are textbooks, they help her study in different ways. Vocab is school related and only occasionally gets difficult if they are going in depth on a particular subject.