It was just ok.

I was floored by how contrived and bad the dialogue is. I get that the author was trying to make it funny, but it just didn't come across that way. I also wasn't particularly impressed by the author's attempt to knock on the 4th wall, acknowledging manga/LN tropes within the text. The writing style was also a chore to slog through, with sentence fragments and odd punctuation on every page. Sometimes what the characters said was in quotation marks and sometimes it wasn't.

The first half of the book was just really bad. Senjogahara's character is just completely unbelievable in any way. The second story goes a long way towards redeeming the book. The idea of the "lost snail" and how it behaves was intriguing. The mystery was developed in a logical way and the stupidity in the conversations was toned down. It also had a feel-good ending.

Too bad it was marred by constant references to pedophilia. That added absolutely nothing to the story except making it extremely awkward.

And that sort of leads me into another critique. Senjogahara and the main character whose name I already can't remember are both supposed to be high school seniors, but the way they are described and the dialogue they're given makes them come across as 13 to 14-year-olds. There are, oddly enough, some passages of dialogue that sound like they came from two 28-year-olds instead of two 17 to 18-year-olds thrown into the mix as well.

Overall, I'm just not too interested in picking up the next book. There's just too much else out there to get involved in. I was hoping this would be a pretty cool series about Japanese fables, but it looks like that's just not the case. ( )

It's hard for me to tell how much of this book I enjoyed because of how much I enjoyed the TV show.

The TL;DR ... "hero" boy keeps meeting girls with supernatural problems. He takes them to his mentor, and finds a way to resolve the issues either as the main actor or as a supporting one. A lot of word-play happens, and imagine that Aaron Sorkin was writing the dialogue.

The anime was quite faithful to the book, so it feels like a comfortable retelling as far as I'm concerned. But that also means that most of what I enjoyed about the anime series shows up in the books.

It also means that it's a book that's almost entirely about quick and affectionate/antagonistic/innuendo-laden back-and-forths between a character who is both noble but also lecherous in a way that's both honest and held-back-just-enough to not feel embarassing (something I feel the anime series after Monogatari lost)

One thing that feels a bit missing is that I don't feel as much hostility to the audience as I did watching the books (while this is a supernatural mystery in the sense that the capers the protagonists are trying to deal with are nicely explained near the end with opportunity for the reader to go back and figure out the clues, there's none of that jump-cutting or wall-of-text bullshit that drew me in from the anime.) It's hard to tell from these early chapters, but the heterosexuality the show beats the audience with [it is trash and you are trash and you like being ashamed by it] is also far more muted and possibly will not grate as much; I'd have to read future volumes to see.

I probably should give this a 5/5 because I gave the anime a 5/5 ... but again, the anime brings something extra to the table that can't exactly happen in text form. Alas, I must be a bit unfair. I have no idea what would have happened if I picked this book up from a store and read it first. I want to say that I would have enjoyed it but I don't know if I'd have loved it as much without the visual audience hostility. ( )

gem ( )