This book will make you sad, happy, and angry; in other words, its a pretty good book.
The author develops most characters: there are 42 students in all; I would say maybe 25-30 were developed enough to care about them. This makes it all the more sad when each meet their inevitable demise. These characters feel like real, living people with their flaws and strengths. So, if you tend to get attached to fictional characters as I do, prepare to have your heart ripped out and stomped on repeatedly. Each character has a backstory and most of the time the author writes from their perspective when they kick the bucket so you get an inside look at the fear, sadness, etc each character feels. The author takes frequent respites from the action to have dialogue between characters and we get to know them better and come to care for them. You will be cheering for many of the characters, and wishing for the demise of others. Granted, the author focused specifically on a group of maybe 10 different students throughout the book, but most of the time he will write from other character's perspectives as well. My only gripe is that the author does not give the evil characters much treatment. We only get the story from ~2 of those characters' viewpoint. When they finally meet their end, they really fizzle out. There's no great final dialog or final thoughts of the evil students reflecting on their actions or anything. One in particular was extremely disappointing as the author strings you along with this student hunting down and mercilessly killing others only to flop over and fizzle out of the story when the time comes. Still, the book's biggest strength would have to be its characters.
Most of the book (~600 -30-40 pages) is spent in the battlefield area so there is non-stop action. There is plenty of suspense because of this, and the author capitalizes on it. For instance, he may make the reader aware that someone is hunting a particular student(s) but will then write from their perspective as they chat together and the whole time you may be screaming in your head "get out of there!!" The author discusses the blood and gore quite a bit from each kill and some are pretty gruesome. However, this did not bother me all that much. Maybe the effect would have been greater had I seen it instead of read it, but it may still affect other readers. Overall the action is pretty good and sometimes good enough to get you to sit on the edge of your seat, and it is not particularly unrealistic as far as I know.
The biggest weakness of this book would have to be its prose. The author's writing is a double-edged sword with good aspects and some not so good aspects. While reading, you can't shake the feeling that you are reading a draft for a book and not a final, published edition. I guess this makes the narrative a bit more "raw" though, which isn't all bad. I would say that it would probably have benefited from some extensive editing. The author's writing style is different, but not in all bad ways. He has the characters reminisce often, even events that may have happened a page or even a paragraph ago, and the writing sometimes suffers from repetition as a result. However this is also a strength because you get inside the heads of characters and see what they are thinking and get more on their backstory. Sometimes it is difficult to tell what is happening in the present and what is happening in the characters thoughts, which I suppose is something of a double-edged sword. Often there is not much of a transition between events happening in the "arena" and the character's thoughts on a tangent, and the author mostly leaves it up to you to figure it out without denoting the transition with italics or quotes or anything at times. Being a translation from Japanese, some reading difficulties are to be expected and I assume that cultural/story-telling differences contribute to the structural and narrative oddities, but again its not all bad. Still, the writing is understandable even if it won't blow you out of your seat, so I suppose its a decent translation. There were no spelling errors that I caught, but sometimes (not often) sentences would have extra words that should not be there. If you like to have your writing a little more refined, then you might want to look elsewhere.
Now, compared to the Hunger Games (I've read that too, and before BR), I liked Battle Royale more because of its characters mostly. In the Hunger Games you only come to care for maybe 2-3 of the characters and tend not to care about 90% of the other characters in the arena, so their deaths have little effect on you. In Battle Royale, its hard not to care for the other characters who meet their grisly demise. That being said, I think HG has much better writing (she has a good use of simple sentences and cliff-hangers at the end of every chapter) than BR and has a bigger scope. I would say they are different enough that they are both worth reading.
So, why give this a 5/5? Mostly because I read the whole thing in less than a day (600 pages)! I could NOT put this book down. I loved the characters and felt genuinely sad when many of them died. I came away from this book with a new appreciation for human life, its fragility, and the tragic effect violence can have on it.
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Came in great condition
One of my favorite books from my high school years. I was ecstatic to find it online, and the last remaining copy from this seller was “good” quality as there is a little bit of staining however everything else is perfect! Cant wait to read this again (:
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- Reviewed in the United States on June 8, 2012
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- BlondesimReviewed in the United Kingdom on January 30, 2015
Forget the film, give this a try!
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