Alice the 101st Review
Apr. 12th, 2011 08:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skjamJust to promote Goodreads, here's a review I posted on it.
Alice the 101st by Chigusa Kawai
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Long time manga readers will quickly spot the basic plot structure here; newbie at the subject matter is immensely talented, but somehow completely ignorant of even the most basic information about it. This allows the suthor to infodump as needed to keep the audience (in this case young teenage girls) up to speed.
Our young protagonist is Aristide Lang, who applies to the Mondonveille School of Music. It's a very exclusive place that only inducts one hundred students a year, but for this year only there's an extra slot just for Aristide. Unfortunately, the one professor who knows what's up and could have saved everyone a lot of headaches gets injured before the start of school, and is apparently incommunicado.
It doesn't help that young Aristide is a bit of a dumbass, who failed to read the school's informational mailings. He can't read music, doesn't hold his bow properly, acts out in public...but it turns out there are a handful of tunes he can play masterfully on the violin.
For young Aristide is actually the son of a famous but short-lived violinist, and he's taught himself to play the few performances his father recorded by ear. That father was also the "101st" during his time at Mondonveille.
The most obvious clue that this volume was written in Japanese is Aristide's much-hated nickname, "Alice." This is due to the "L/R" and syllabic construction of Japanese, and doesn't really work in English or French. Likewise, Aristide's preferred name of "Aristo" is based on katakana syllabary. Most nicknamers in the setting would just pick "Ari."
The characters are fairly stock: absent-minded genius, snotty upper-class twit, helpful buddy, self-absorbed girl, irritable teacher and the creepy senior student (who apparently is the one giving this a "yaoi" label, since he's evidently bisexual.)
I find the premise dubious at best--how is it that a kid who's going to be a violinist, and this has been known for years, never got any formal training whatsoever? There's some clues that suggest a problem with his mother, but if that were the case, surely we'd have seen her be more opposed to this whole music school thing.
It's adequate for what it is, but I would not recommend it to people who have a low tolerance for implausibility or idiot heroes.
View all my reviews
Alice the 101st by Chigusa KawaiMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
Long time manga readers will quickly spot the basic plot structure here; newbie at the subject matter is immensely talented, but somehow completely ignorant of even the most basic information about it. This allows the suthor to infodump as needed to keep the audience (in this case young teenage girls) up to speed.
Our young protagonist is Aristide Lang, who applies to the Mondonveille School of Music. It's a very exclusive place that only inducts one hundred students a year, but for this year only there's an extra slot just for Aristide. Unfortunately, the one professor who knows what's up and could have saved everyone a lot of headaches gets injured before the start of school, and is apparently incommunicado.
It doesn't help that young Aristide is a bit of a dumbass, who failed to read the school's informational mailings. He can't read music, doesn't hold his bow properly, acts out in public...but it turns out there are a handful of tunes he can play masterfully on the violin.
For young Aristide is actually the son of a famous but short-lived violinist, and he's taught himself to play the few performances his father recorded by ear. That father was also the "101st" during his time at Mondonveille.
The most obvious clue that this volume was written in Japanese is Aristide's much-hated nickname, "Alice." This is due to the "L/R" and syllabic construction of Japanese, and doesn't really work in English or French. Likewise, Aristide's preferred name of "Aristo" is based on katakana syllabary. Most nicknamers in the setting would just pick "Ari."
The characters are fairly stock: absent-minded genius, snotty upper-class twit, helpful buddy, self-absorbed girl, irritable teacher and the creepy senior student (who apparently is the one giving this a "yaoi" label, since he's evidently bisexual.)
I find the premise dubious at best--how is it that a kid who's going to be a violinist, and this has been known for years, never got any formal training whatsoever? There's some clues that suggest a problem with his mother, but if that were the case, surely we'd have seen her be more opposed to this whole music school thing.
It's adequate for what it is, but I would not recommend it to people who have a low tolerance for implausibility or idiot heroes.
View all my reviews
