Battle Royale

Action packed? Fun? Cliche? Most definitely.

Battle Royale is mediocre. If one's idea of a good action read is rushed with adrenaline, finesse mandatory, then it is excellent. In my case where the characters themselves make a big percentage for my rating for the novel, it is not.

The gore, the meat of the story, flies off the pages despite the occasional typo or sentence lost in translation. In the end that's what this six-hundred paged demon is about: a mainstream interpretation of once average or not-quite-average kids either becoming predator or prey to save their ideals or themselves, usually the former in the last two cases. It attempts to be “dark” and “bloody” and somewhat succeeds. It's not the “deep” in classic literature, but the “deep” in YA novels designed for a popcorn movie. The themes are discussed in Battle Royale, but it reaches the sighting of the bone when I wanted to taste the marrow.

There is a quick summary of each narrator before their imminent death which fails to garner sympathy. To be fair, a chapter or two is dedicated even for the minor ones and an effort was done bringing some personality to each person–even if their motivations seemed all the same in my head–but the characters were too one-dimensional, and the reader's growing desensitization as the story went by made each death's impact falter. This is impossible to fix, as detailed backstories would wane the sprinting pace of the story.

The plot is predictable. It's not difficult to tell what would happen within the first few paragraphs of each chapter. It does fly by at the speed of light, and by the time I was done the only sign that the book was six hundred pages were my tired arms.

Action junkies will love this, but people who dislike gore and lack of events besides stabbing and shooting in their stories won't. It isn't horrible, though. The enjoyment of the reader depends whether they are able to ignore its flaws and enjoy the show.