人外教室の人間嫌い教師 ヒトマ先生、私たちに人間を教えてくれますか......?

Not bad, but nothing special

I got this book because I follow the artist who did the illustrations on Twitter, and I'm happy to report that the art is beautiful! Unfortunately, I wasn't very impressed with the actual story those pictures were a part of.

人間零 (Hitoma Rei) is a human, as his name very subtly implies, but he's hired to work as a teacher at a secret all-female school for non-humans who want to become humans. He's the homeroom teacher for the highest level class, which has only 4 students, and the bulk of the book consists of the four chapters where he gets to know each of them more personally. Plus a beach chapter, because of course there's a beach chapter.

Some of the weird things I didn't like: Timeskips happen CONSTANTLY. In order to squeeze a whole year into one novel, a ton of time passes with no warning in the middle of chapters. Also, the setup of him as a teacher and the other characters as students makes the frequent...risqué moments very uncomfortable. Character development is also sorely lacking, and it felt like the author was afraid to let characters grow, lest they lose their personality gimmick in the process (which only makes them feel even more one-dimensional as a result). That said, there are some really good ideas here too— in particular, Usami's chapter caught me by surprise and had me far more engaged than I expected.

This review got long somehow, but basically, the book is ok.