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Turning the Tables on the Seatmate Killer! Volume 1
By some unsavory stroke of luck, Yuuki Narito found himself sitting next to none other than the mischievous Yui Takatsuki. This girl had built herself a reputation of stringing guys along only to reject them when they finally dared to confess their feelings for her. This, in turn, earned her a certain nickname: “The Seatmate Killer.”
It was only a matter of time before Yuuki fell victim to the overly friendly Yui, but little did she know that he was as clueless as they come! The tables have suddenly been turned, and the hunter will soon become the prey.
“Damn it! You think that poker face of yours is gonna get to me?! I’ll make you regret this, you’ll see!”
This rom-com is off to a bumpy start as a now-determined Yui takes it upon herself to get her revenge!
It was only a matter of time before Yuuki fell victim to the overly friendly Yui, but little did she know that he was as clueless as they come! The tables have suddenly been turned, and the hunter will soon become the prey.
“Damn it! You think that poker face of yours is gonna get to me?! I’ll make you regret this, you’ll see!”
This rom-com is off to a bumpy start as a now-determined Yui takes it upon herself to get her revenge!
251 pages, Kindle Edition
Published October 31, 2021
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34 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
April 26, 2022
Yuuki barely exists amongst his other classmates and he likes it just fine. The best-laid seating plans of mice and men, however, see him sat next to Yui, the notorious Seatmate Killer. She lures guys in and then rejects their confessions, but has she met her match in the immovable wall that is Yuuki?
The perfect romantic comedy light novel must surely exist, but it just as surely isn’t this half-baked bit of business, which combines a slew of grammatical errors, overly complicated writing, and one hell of a little sister into a boring mess.
From the get-go, even the premise is a total non-starter: Yui is no such thing as she’s described, just a girl trying her best to be friendly who her precious seatmates made their own leaps in logic over. So she gets a vicious reputation because some guys figured she must be into them. Great start.
So when Yui ends up liking Yuuki, he thinks she’s living up to her reputation, but the problem is that the original premise was a lot more interesting than watching this sack of potatoes ‘whatever’ his way through her advances.
Combine that with Yuuki making the wild assumption that Yui is clearly operating with some kind of extreme mental disorder and my teeth are already grating down to the nub. This is a sensitive topic and, yes, you can get jokes out of this if you’re very careful (and even then, big maybe), but this story has no capacity for that.
Of course, Yuuki’s the one with the real trauma, having lost his mother and having to be as stoic and supportive as possible for his sister, Mina. Which isn’t a bad narrative hook, until Mina enters the equation.
Mina’s got a brother complex visible
from space and the book is more than content to use its words to describe her wandering their apartment in her panties and every other highly unlikely bit of business you can come up with.
This girl has a lot of unaddressed trauma from her mom’s death, but why worry about that half as much as getting her into an apron and little else? The book’s penchant for this is creepy as hell, it feels like narrative sexualizing.
Poor Yui just gets flustered and constantly put on the back foot by Yuuki, but you’d think the story was less interested in her as the romantic interest than Mina (the story tries to ‘ha ha’ this away, but whether Yuuki is interested or not, somebody clearly is).
This does get better towards the end, as the old ‘fake girlfriend’ ruse blows up and forces the family to say some stuff they should have said years ago and Yui does some good and, hey, what is the definition of too little, too late again?
Most of this is just Yui trying to be nice or get her feelings across and Yuuki just saying something to calm her down because he’s being a different type of presumptive jerk from the other guys Yui has known. That’s some noble gas level chemistry right there.
2 stars - this is a boring normalizing of what could have been a good story twist that isn’t romantic and isn’t comedic (they sure do drop in a Kaguya-sama reference to remind me I’d rather be reading that instead). It was an absolute chore to get through and I don’t see a second volume in my future.
The perfect romantic comedy light novel must surely exist, but it just as surely isn’t this half-baked bit of business, which combines a slew of grammatical errors, overly complicated writing, and one hell of a little sister into a boring mess.
From the get-go, even the premise is a total non-starter: Yui is no such thing as she’s described, just a girl trying her best to be friendly who her precious seatmates made their own leaps in logic over. So she gets a vicious reputation because some guys figured she must be into them. Great start.
So when Yui ends up liking Yuuki, he thinks she’s living up to her reputation, but the problem is that the original premise was a lot more interesting than watching this sack of potatoes ‘whatever’ his way through her advances.
Combine that with Yuuki making the wild assumption that Yui is clearly operating with some kind of extreme mental disorder and my teeth are already grating down to the nub. This is a sensitive topic and, yes, you can get jokes out of this if you’re very careful (and even then, big maybe), but this story has no capacity for that.
Of course, Yuuki’s the one with the real trauma, having lost his mother and having to be as stoic and supportive as possible for his sister, Mina. Which isn’t a bad narrative hook, until Mina enters the equation.
Mina’s got a brother complex visible
from space and the book is more than content to use its words to describe her wandering their apartment in her panties and every other highly unlikely bit of business you can come up with.
This girl has a lot of unaddressed trauma from her mom’s death, but why worry about that half as much as getting her into an apron and little else? The book’s penchant for this is creepy as hell, it feels like narrative sexualizing.
Poor Yui just gets flustered and constantly put on the back foot by Yuuki, but you’d think the story was less interested in her as the romantic interest than Mina (the story tries to ‘ha ha’ this away, but whether Yuuki is interested or not, somebody clearly is).
This does get better towards the end, as the old ‘fake girlfriend’ ruse blows up and forces the family to say some stuff they should have said years ago and Yui does some good and, hey, what is the definition of too little, too late again?
Most of this is just Yui trying to be nice or get her feelings across and Yuuki just saying something to calm her down because he’s being a different type of presumptive jerk from the other guys Yui has known. That’s some noble gas level chemistry right there.
2 stars - this is a boring normalizing of what could have been a good story twist that isn’t romantic and isn’t comedic (they sure do drop in a Kaguya-sama reference to remind me I’d rather be reading that instead). It was an absolute chore to get through and I don’t see a second volume in my future.
January 21, 2023
TURNING THE TABLES ON THE SEATMATE KILLER v1 is a densely written, yet ultimately very casual jaunt into the world of high-school anxiety. Getting along with seatmates feels like a life-or-death event. But in reality, it's only as complicated as one makes it.
Admittedly, most readers may not be so patient as to wade through hundreds of pages for an hour-by-hour account of a schoolyard romantic comedy. The novel has its moments, but one must acknowledge from the outset, that a 220-page comedy novel printed in a small font type immediately suggests the author is prone to excessive detail or overwriting. Such are the drawbacks of printed adaptations of web novels, one supposes.
Yuuki Narito falls into the mold of the highly competent, highly average high-school kid. He's perfectly oblivious, perfectly modest, and perfectly sociable (if he feels like it). Yui Takatsuki, his new seatmate, is attractive, popular, and a bit of a chatterbox. The assumption is that Yui's obvious glamor entrances every guy she sits next to (only to promptly rebuff them.). But the twist is that Yui, gregarious though she may be, is overly conscientious and just wants to fit in. She wants to fit in so badly that she overcompensates, a lot, and accidentally forces her classmates to veer toward (or away from) her, based on the girl's convivial nature.
That Yui falls in love with the regularly invisible Yuuki is not a surprise; the surprise (and the fun) is that when Yui realizes she's in love, she goes all in, damning the consequences.
A bit of good fun, and with a dash of ecchi humor, TURNING THE TABLES ON THE SEATMATE KILLER v1 is best read casually. The narrative is familiar enough that readers can predict much of the novel's twists and turns (e.g., big brother complex; interfering elder sister), but not so rote as to deprive one of a few delightful disruptions.
Yuuki, for example, though oblivious, isn't cynical (as his genre predecessors typically are). He's not opposed to getting into a relationship with a classmate, he's simply unconvinced the time is worth the effort. This slight deviation from the reserved archetype means Yuuki doesn't stress himself (too much) when being kind, faithful, reliable, or romantic. Not to say the kid isn't stressed. He definitely is. It's just that he's comfortably mellow about it.
The novel's low-key approach to Yuuki and other characters' anxiety is its hook. Yuuki's male classmates' obsession with branding Yui a "seatmate killer" is less harmful than it is boyishly stupid (Kento: "[She's] fixed on taking you down. The Seatmate Killer doesn't rest until she ensures the demise of her prey. It's hit or miss, and she's never missed," page 98). And Yui herself, while glib in public, secretly frets over very conversation, every laugh, and every sideways glance. The girl papers over her bashfulness with bad jokes and intense stares. Can she really be blamed if others take her behavior the wrong way?
The sad reality is that Yui wishes she were less bold, less extroverted, and less attention-seeking than she currently is. The girl longs for peace, quiet, and simplicity, but got caught up in a coy quest for camaraderie ("If only she could remember her old self [..]," page 45).
Insofar as challenges go, TURNING THE TABLES ON THE SEATMATE KILLER v1 is a long read. Very little happens, in narrative terms, but the story is so densely written that readers are forced to account for each character on an hour-by-hour basis. One loses very little in the way of engagement, for example, by putting the book down for a week and picking it back up again.
The book's translation is good. Notwithstanding some quirky contortions and cultural differences that either fall flat or don't make very much sense (e.g., puns, comedy gags), most linguistic oddities are limited to the usual idiosyncrasies of character names or forms of address (e.g., Yuuki's little sister calls him "Yukkie," but the pronunciation is somewhat unclear).
If anything, typesetting is the novel's biggest problem. The book is certainly legible, and is professionally printed, but the number of typesetting errors and mistakes is problematic: wayward apostrophes, improper or use/nonuse of italics, missing words, errant (mid-sentence) paragraph breaks, miscapitalization, mixing of American English and British English spellings, and so forth. Among these and other issues, bad line breaks are the most common by a significant margin. Experience in layout and composition isn't necessary for one to locate an incorrect line break; a few such examples, understandably, are trivial (e.g., "believa/ble," "inconcei/vable"), others are simply awkward (e.g., "exc/laimed," "retros/pect"), but some are downright egregious (e.g., "tur/ned," "sto/pped," "nickna/me," "remembe/ring," "hea/dphones," "ste/pped," "tho/se").
TURNING THE TABLES ON THE SEATMATE KILLER v1 isn't a bad book, but it is a challenge to read in a timely manner. The dreary pacing and trope-adjacent character archetypes lend the novel a casual and familiar glint; readers won't gain much by checking out the story, and they won't miss much by skipping it either.
Admittedly, most readers may not be so patient as to wade through hundreds of pages for an hour-by-hour account of a schoolyard romantic comedy. The novel has its moments, but one must acknowledge from the outset, that a 220-page comedy novel printed in a small font type immediately suggests the author is prone to excessive detail or overwriting. Such are the drawbacks of printed adaptations of web novels, one supposes.
Yuuki Narito falls into the mold of the highly competent, highly average high-school kid. He's perfectly oblivious, perfectly modest, and perfectly sociable (if he feels like it). Yui Takatsuki, his new seatmate, is attractive, popular, and a bit of a chatterbox. The assumption is that Yui's obvious glamor entrances every guy she sits next to (only to promptly rebuff them.). But the twist is that Yui, gregarious though she may be, is overly conscientious and just wants to fit in. She wants to fit in so badly that she overcompensates, a lot, and accidentally forces her classmates to veer toward (or away from) her, based on the girl's convivial nature.
That Yui falls in love with the regularly invisible Yuuki is not a surprise; the surprise (and the fun) is that when Yui realizes she's in love, she goes all in, damning the consequences.
A bit of good fun, and with a dash of ecchi humor, TURNING THE TABLES ON THE SEATMATE KILLER v1 is best read casually. The narrative is familiar enough that readers can predict much of the novel's twists and turns (e.g., big brother complex; interfering elder sister), but not so rote as to deprive one of a few delightful disruptions.
Yuuki, for example, though oblivious, isn't cynical (as his genre predecessors typically are). He's not opposed to getting into a relationship with a classmate, he's simply unconvinced the time is worth the effort. This slight deviation from the reserved archetype means Yuuki doesn't stress himself (too much) when being kind, faithful, reliable, or romantic. Not to say the kid isn't stressed. He definitely is. It's just that he's comfortably mellow about it.
The novel's low-key approach to Yuuki and other characters' anxiety is its hook. Yuuki's male classmates' obsession with branding Yui a "seatmate killer" is less harmful than it is boyishly stupid (Kento: "[She's] fixed on taking you down. The Seatmate Killer doesn't rest until she ensures the demise of her prey. It's hit or miss, and she's never missed," page 98). And Yui herself, while glib in public, secretly frets over very conversation, every laugh, and every sideways glance. The girl papers over her bashfulness with bad jokes and intense stares. Can she really be blamed if others take her behavior the wrong way?
The sad reality is that Yui wishes she were less bold, less extroverted, and less attention-seeking than she currently is. The girl longs for peace, quiet, and simplicity, but got caught up in a coy quest for camaraderie ("If only she could remember her old self [..]," page 45).
Insofar as challenges go, TURNING THE TABLES ON THE SEATMATE KILLER v1 is a long read. Very little happens, in narrative terms, but the story is so densely written that readers are forced to account for each character on an hour-by-hour basis. One loses very little in the way of engagement, for example, by putting the book down for a week and picking it back up again.
The book's translation is good. Notwithstanding some quirky contortions and cultural differences that either fall flat or don't make very much sense (e.g., puns, comedy gags), most linguistic oddities are limited to the usual idiosyncrasies of character names or forms of address (e.g., Yuuki's little sister calls him "Yukkie," but the pronunciation is somewhat unclear).
If anything, typesetting is the novel's biggest problem. The book is certainly legible, and is professionally printed, but the number of typesetting errors and mistakes is problematic: wayward apostrophes, improper or use/nonuse of italics, missing words, errant (mid-sentence) paragraph breaks, miscapitalization, mixing of American English and British English spellings, and so forth. Among these and other issues, bad line breaks are the most common by a significant margin. Experience in layout and composition isn't necessary for one to locate an incorrect line break; a few such examples, understandably, are trivial (e.g., "believa/ble," "inconcei/vable"), others are simply awkward (e.g., "exc/laimed," "retros/pect"), but some are downright egregious (e.g., "tur/ned," "sto/pped," "nickna/me," "remembe/ring," "hea/dphones," "ste/pped," "tho/se").
TURNING THE TABLES ON THE SEATMATE KILLER v1 isn't a bad book, but it is a challenge to read in a timely manner. The dreary pacing and trope-adjacent character archetypes lend the novel a casual and familiar glint; readers won't gain much by checking out the story, and they won't miss much by skipping it either.
October 3, 2022
It was okay just not my cup of tea. Since the teasing was too much and there’s not even a time to breath.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews