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Reviewed by Craig Johnson ”Off the streets and on the job, Eikicki Onizuka has ascended to the exalted ranks of schoolteacher only to discover he’s now got to learn how to teach. And the students are not going to make it easy for him. A gaggle of seemingly placid young pupils who have already driven three teachers into psychotic fits now set their sights on the Great Teacher. But they could very well have underestimated Onizuka’s unusually high threshold for punishment.” His first semester as a fully fledged teacher, and our dumb but charismatic teacher Onizuka is landed with the worst class of sophomores around – in their freshman year they dispatched three teachers, essentially by a continual process of subtle abuse and harassment (although late in the book one of the students states they’ve been doing this for three years, which would mean the whole class did it for a couple of years in high school? Just one of a number of implausibilities that need to be overlooked). As we saw in the last two volumes, Onizuka is clearly going to come out on top of these guys, it’s just a question of how – so there’s not much drama in the situation, it’s all played for comedic effect: the students pull a prank, Onizuka ignores it, or doesn’t understand it, or turns it around. In a neat twist, he begins to form a relationship with one of the troublemakers’ leaders mom, and that really drives the student up the wall…cracks begin to form in the class as some of the male students decide that Onizuka is worth liking and listening to. It kicks into higher gear when the girls get involved, punishing a classmate for his friendliness towards Onizuka by stipping him naked and photographing him. Onizuka gains a neat revenge in typically impulsive fashion, but the consequences of this could be far reaching. Nice touches this time include getting into the head of the VP of the school who hates Onizuka, we see a little of the his life and the reasons behind his actions: he’s not turning into a sympathetic character by any means, but Onizuka is like a whirlwind, shaking things up and moving on, unconscious of the destruction he’s caused, and it’s good occasionally to take a breather to follow up some of these consequences. The book is weakened by a number of simple homophone spelling errors (hear/here) which really should’ve been picked up in the proofing stage, as they jar one back to reality from being engrossed in the story. A good book overall, though, with a neat cliffhanger to drag you into book four immediately. Comment on this review of GTO v3 on the Manga Life Forums. |
6 October 2009
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