Reviews with content warning for Domestic abuse - Battle Royale

I liked parts of this book, but overall it was a little bit disappointing. I thought I'll have more issues with the contents of this book: the violence and even the sexist notions throughout but all of that I could easily overlook. My first main issue is with Shuya. Following a character that is supposed to be "noble" but comes off as a person with no sense of self-preservation is pretty frustrating. Shuya is pretty much piggybacking another character the whole time because without them, he would already be dead multiple times. I was not rooting for him at all and as we get to meet more and more characters and closely see their strategies and motivations, Shuya comes off easily as the most bland and boring character, which might work for a self-insert hero fantasy but not for a compelling and full-fledged character.

My second issue was the constant conversations about who has a crush on whom. I'm not a teenager for quite some time, but I don't think that teenagers are in need of romance drama 24/7 while they are in life-death situations. At least not every single one of them. And how those feelings are discussed is a completely different issue. Just get on with it and get dying. This book would be so much better (and shorter) if the author cut out all the romance crap. The friendship would serve just the same purpose while not feeling cheap, especially because that one characters has/had feelings for their classmate is always revealed in such a rushed way (mostly seconds before death of one or both of the two), it's usually one-sided and it's just about "oh this person is feeling like shit about this person dying because crush, I guess". Characters (and especially girls) freezing and reminiscing about the guys they had a crush on in the most inconvenient times happened one too many times for me to care. The relationship based on friendship worked much better and made more sense, but they were few and far between compared to the crushes.

I could do without the mentions of prostitution of 15y, sexual traumas of way too many girls, but that was something I kind of expected from this book. A lot of things were there just for a shock value and while it might mask as a character's history as to why they are fucked up, it didn't really land.

Might be a controversial take but I would prefer if the book truly ended after Kawada 'shoots' Shuya and Noriko, that part shocked me and I was rooting for it to be the plot twist, but oh well, some semi-happy ending needed to be there I guess.

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atalea's review against another edition

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dark tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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afonyamuffin's review against another edition

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challenging dark tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

I read this book 9 years ago when I was like 17 (which thinking back I’m not sure how good of an idea that was but that’s for another day) and with all the Squid Game hype (I still haven’t watched the show) and The Boyz’s latest release, Maverick got me in the mood to finally reread Battle Royale, which is actually an old favourite. It crazy how many things I missed out on as a teen and I have a lot of thoughts about the book so here we are. I buddy read it with my friend Rebeka and honestly I haven’t been this excited about reading a book and then discussing it with someone so I’m really happy I got around reading it. I will include spoilers in this one because I need to talk about things in details so if you havent read the book or saw the movie I suggest you go read it first and comeback if you don’t want to be spoiled.

So for those who are not familiar with the book and are still here despite the spoilers, it was written in the 90s, which is going to be important to keep in mind as I progress with the review. It takes place in a future Japan setting where junior high students are forced to fight to the death. Shuya and his class are on their way to a class trip when they are kidnapped and taken to an island to participate in The Program, where the 42 students have to kill each other until there is just one person standing. Reading this even if you haven’t heard about this song I’m sure you recognize the story from The Hunger Games. I think if you liked The Hunger Games you definitely should read this one as Battle Royale is obviously one of the stories that influenced Suzanne Collins. However I do want to leave some trigger warnings, this is a much more gruesome book than THG is. The book’s main characters are Shuya, Noriko and Kawada, but it jumps between the other classmates’ point of view as well.

Trigger warning: mentions of rape, domestic violence, homophobia, suicide, blood, gore, death, guns, mutilation, injuries, etc.

Oh boy, do I have a lot of thoughts! Like I said there were a lot of things that I missed out on at the fresh age of 17 and now I’m sitting here like… Let’s start with the questionable things. One of these things is mentions of rape, especially in the beginning. In other cases it feels like it has a reason to be in the story...

More on the blog: https://berriesandbooksblog.wordpress.com/2021/11/07/battle-royale-by-koushun-takami-enghun-spoilery-review/

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johnreadsthings's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional mysterious tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

THIS IS INCREDIBLE AHHHHH

It lost me in the middle a bit, but that introduction and conclusion were so brilliantly constructed. The menace was so palpable. And the characters, alive!

During the middle part, Takami introduced most of the students, something that could be daunting to write and not rewarding in the end. It did get a bit repetitive and predictable every time a new student was presented because you'd know that they'd be dead by the end of the chapter. But I'd have to commend Takami because each student had their own lives and personalities, and were not treated as merely numbers and side characters that would forward the story to its eventual and inevitable end or serve as a respite from the leads. In fact, some of the kids really left a mark. My personal favorites among them were Takako Chigusa and Sho Tsukioka.

I wasn't feeling Shuya and Noriko as the main leads right at the beginning and I only somewhat tolerated them coming at the ending, but I did grow to like them! I'd still like read more about Shinji Mimura and Hiroki Sugimura whose arcs were brilliantly written. But I guess it's safe to say that Takami's best constructed character here was Shogo Kawada. I'm not going to spoil anything by talking about Shogo, so let's leave it at that.

The game itself was relentlessly violent and gore. The author didn't shy away from giving the whole picture, along with its dirty, disgusting bits. And his political critique was equally scathing and explicit. He didn't sanitize and bow down to anything. And this made the novel much more revolting, effective, and memorable.

That ending came like Shogo's rushing truck across the island. It was the cherry on top of this really, really good book.

At first I thought that Koushun Takami's Battle Royale simply had the advantage of being one of the first of its kind (it's not lost in me that this is called a somewhat of a retelling of Golding's The Lord of the Flies), but it's more than that: this was also an intelligent, well-constructed, and amazing piece of work.

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thegr8estangell's review against another edition

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dark emotional sad tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

2.75

I'm glad this author wrote only one book. I really liked the premise of this book. I think they were way more brutal in this book than in the Hunger Games (a series with a similar plot). I liked the way that some of the deaths were from the 1st person POV of the person being killed and other deaths were from different POVs. I wished we got more POV time with Kiriyama.

The pacing of this book was all over the place. Sometimes it was fast and tense, other times it was slow and arduous. There were so many flashbacks to stupid elementary school grudges and stuff like that. It got old pretty quick. I skimmed alot of those since they had little to nothing to do with the actual plot of the story.

What really bothered me about this story was the sexism and causal homophobia. Do I expect anything different from a middle-aged Japanese man in the 90s? No. Does that mean I have to look over that to enjoy this book? Not really no. I can still criticize it and still think the book is okay. Noriko was about as useless as Sakura during the Zabuza arc in Naruto. She was written as a damsel in distress and that was all she played the entire time. Just a helpless little school girl who just wanted to survive and was content with letting her big strong men of Kawada and Shuya protect her. Shuya was this weird, white knight character that felt like every girl had a crush on. He was so popular but didn't know it. That was really annoying. He was always this, ethical person during the whole thing. He never had to make a bad or hard choice about killing someone. There was no morally grey with him like there was with Kawada. He was in this situation where he had to kill people but he never had to make that tough decision without weighing the consequences. Kawada was a cool character. I liked him. He was the only rational one in the whole book. I know it's because this was round 2 for him, but still. Good character.

The BIGGEST plot hole was the GOD-TIER status of that stupid bullet proof vest. After one bullet, those things are done. They don't last 14 other bullets to the chest, a shot gun blast, and 300+ rounds of an UZI. They don't. That's not how they are made. That was plot device that got tired real quick.

Overall, I think the violence and stakes were done well. But the actual plot needed some work. Would I read this again? No. Would I recommend this book to someone? Maybe, depends on the person.

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