Imagine The Lord of the Flies but instead of a bunch of British schoolboys, it's an entire elementary school full of Japanese kids, and instead of a desert island, it's a barren wasteland populated with giant killer bugs.

What starts out as a normal school day turns nightmarish - a mysterious event transports an elementary school and its grounds into a vast desert. The kids and teachers are left to figure out what's going on.

This book is pretty brutal, and gets violent quickly, almost to an absurdist level. It feels kind of like reading a fever dream. So many insane things happen to these kids, and throughout they're making all these adult decisions?? Meanwhile the actual adults lose it almost instantly. (You'd think teachers would care more about kids... right? WRONG.)

Despite that it hooked me and I was really invested in finding out what would happen to them, and why they ended up in a desert wasteland. The character development also improves rapidly - I hated the main character in the first couple chapters, but he improves a lot as the story progresses.

I definitely want to give the rest of this series a go. ( )

Series Info/Source: This is the first volume in The Drifting Classroom: Perfect Edition. There are three Perfect Edition collections for this series. I got a copy of this as a gift for Christmas.

Thoughts: I enjoyed the initial premise and mystery behind this but wasn’t super impressed with the direction the story took. The illustration is well done and easy to follow but things just kind of went off the rails and didn’t make a lot of sense as the story continued.

The premise is that a whole elementary school disappears from modern day Japan and ends up somewhere “other”. There appears to be nothing but sand outside the building. As the school descends into anarchy because of panic-ridden adults (and some students) things begin to quickly collapse and the death toll rises to a staggering amount.

As I said above, I like the premise here but what I didn’t understand is what happened after the school ended up in the other place. Why were the adults going crazy and killing each other? Why were some of the students doing the same? Why did the adults suddenly get so violent with the other kids? Why were kids jumping off the roof convinced they were flying? There is a bit of hand waving explanation about people’s minds not being able to handle the change but it felt pretty weak to me.

I thought this was going to be more of a story about these kids and teachers exploring a new horrific world. I did not think they were all going to go nutty and be more of a danger to each other than any horrific landscape. They also spent nearly a whole book in this volume fighting a big bug thing which was just weird. I am going to give the story the benefit of the doubt and assume the giant bugs, madness, and general mayhem are actually a part of a larger cohesive story somehow…but by the end of this book I just felt kind of bored and mildly exasperated with the lack of any plot.

My Summary (3/5): Overall the initial premise is interesting and the illustration is well done and easy to follow. I was disappointed with where the story went though. I thought I was getting into some sort of horrific adventure and more it ended up being everyone just panicking and killing each other. I can only assume that the story gets more interesting in future volumes. Unfortunately, I won’t be reading those because these volumes are expensive and at least this volume is pretty much serving as a doorstop for me now…I have no desire to read it again. If you are into the whole people desperately killing each other in a school for no reason other than oddly unjustified panic, you might enjoy this more than I did. ( )

I picked this up after my teen finished it and before returning it to the library.

Yikes.
( )