This was a fun read overall with lots of action and gruesome scenes. Kept me hooked throughout. Although I feel in retrospect I may have not been the intended audience due to some highschool tropes and scenes. ( )

I'm not sure if it's the fault of the translation but Battle Royale is written in such a simplistic style, all telling and not showing, but this makes the book a fast and easy read. Halfway through the book, I started growing bored. The deaths of all the students was getting repetitive, however each student's circumstances and back stories were interesting, and I was kind of surprised that so many of them were motivated by their romantic desires-- but then again, maybe it shouldn't be so surprising after all, considering the age of the characters. The anxiety and hope the characters felt, in relation to their romantic interests, definitely reflected my experiences as a teenager. The main couple Shuya and Noriko were bland choices for main characters; the story would have been more interesting if it had focused on Kiriyama or Mitsuko instead. I was a little disappointed there wasn't more of a confrontation with them. ( )

Holy shit.


I just...............holy shit.



While I learn how to breathe again, I will attempt to talk about what has been consuming my entire life for the last 3 days or so. I picked this book up because I saw a recommendation from someone who said that it was similar to Hunger Games - which I loved. Honestly, they are different in a lot of ways. The main premise of this story is a class of high school students in what is called The Greater Republic of East Asia (I think it was meant to be mostly Japan, but I'm not sure) get thrown into this thing called The Program. This country is clearly dystopian, rock music is banned, people get killed off for speaking out against the gov, etc. This Program was founded in 1947 and each year one class of students is selected at random. Apparently it is supposed to be a sort of social experiment. The selected class is forced onto an island, given weapons at random, and forced to kill each other. The people running this Program are vicious and horrible. They kill two students for simply annoying them before the "game" even really begins. The students all have collars around their necks and are told that if they try to remove them, they will explode and kill them, if they are in a forbidden zone, it will explode, if no one dies within 24 hours, everyone's will explode, if they try to escape, guess what? Their collar will explode.


The novel mostly takes place with 3 main characters, Shuya, Shogo and Noriko, but you get a tiny bit of the perspective of every student at one point or another. It was a little hard to keep everyone straight, I am not familiar with asian names and there were so many of them, and they were all so similar that it took me a little while to get them down. The writing is pretty simplistic and very easy to follow, and it gets violent. The simplistic style helped to bring out the violence in a kinda weird way. The book catches your attention right in the beginning, a lot of people die within the first 100 pages or so and you really get into the story. It stays consistent in keeping your attention throughout the book.

I only had a couple of issues with this. The girls.......well the girls were pathetic. Most of them just spent the novel crying (understandable, I would cry in that situation too) or gripping about their crushes. The boys did that too actually. Most of the kids last thoughts were about the people they had crushes on and how they didn't tell them etc. None of them really thought about their families, or what they would have wanted to do with their lives etc. It just bothered me a little. I mostly got over it, but the girls thing really bothered me. The main girl, Noriko was really pathetic, she was sick most of the time, and all she really did was reload bullets. There was only really one girl actually strong and playing the game (she was nuts, but still).

Other than that, I really liked the novel. I love dystopian, high adrenaline, people thrust into horrifying situations novels and this was just that. The ending!!! I really wasn't expecting it, and it caught me off guard in the best possible way. I was really pleased with how the author brought everything together. THe last line.......brilliant. ( )

Written in the late 1990s, Battle Royale takes place in an alternate timeline, Japan is a totalitarian state, called the Republic of Greater East Asia. The government chooses a class of fifty junior high school students, who are forced to kill each other another until only one student remains, supposedly for military research. Here, during a school trip, the 21 boys and 21 girls of Shiroiwa Junior High School are gassed, wakening on an evacuated island, wearing explosive metal collars. After explaining the rules, students are randomly issued survival packs (with water, food, and a random weapon) and sent out in two-minute intervals.

This was an action-packed, violent, gory predecessor (by at least a decade) of The Hunger Games. It was refreshing to see both male and female killers, and the author’s exploration of the student’s feelings about themselves and each other was well done. The constant tension between trust and betrayal kept readers constantly wondering what would happen next, and I liked the several twists at the end. I had a hard time keeping track of the student’s Japanese names, wondered why there were a seemingly infinite number of bullets as well as how the students were so proficient using weapons they have never handled, and finally, how three students, with injuries, can overpower a ship’s adult crew in their daring escape. ( )

Loved the movie, and loved the book. I'm going to give the author the benefit of the doubt, though, and say the translation was a bit stilted. I found it tough to read just because the writing/translation doesn't always flow well, and Gollancz seem to have skimped on the proofreading (spaces before full stops, and occasionally a missing word).

Content-wise, though, it's fantastic. More violent and action-packed than [b:The Hunger Games Trilogy Boxset|7938275|The Hunger Games Trilogy Boxset (The Hunger Games, #1-3)|Suzanne Collins|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1274791992s/7938275.jpg|11349083], and the main character spends less time hiding in cupboards or passed out during crucial moments. That's a win for me right there. ( )