Have you ever come across a novel (or in this case, manga) that you liked in theory, and even a good portion of its parts, but overall it just wasn’t quite what you would have liked? That was my experience with the first volume of Ouran High School Host Club. There were some things I liked, but it just was not enough for me to love it. It just was not for me.My favourite thing of Ouran High School Host Club was easily the main character, Haruhi. She is clever, practical and generally unflappable – a good thing (and stark contrast) to the rest of the cast. I love characters like her, and only wish I could see more of them about. While in his first appearances Tamaki did little to endear me to him, watching his interactions with Haruhi over the course of this volume changed the way I viewed him; by the end of this volume I was enjoying him as a character on his own, and found myself very easily calling him my second favourite character.
Of course, it was easy to peg Tamaki as the second-favourite character as, well, the other characters were pretty much almost non-entities to me. Some did not present enough to capture my interest, while others sort of stepped beyond the realms of parody and into the realms of… “meh” and flicking forward to the next page.
Overall, the first volume of Ouran High School Host Club was something I did enjoy while reading, but had it been just a few steps in one direction or the other I most likely would have loved it. However I have heard that some of the things that I had an issue with, however minor1 do improve in later volumes, so I think that if I see the next volume about I’ll take a look.
