Review: Battle Royale

Battle Royale by Koushun Takami
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I’m always curious about cult classics. Battle Royale, however, was always the one sitting at the top of my curiosity list. I was super curious, constantly telling myself to read it, and had high hopes.

Alas, I’m in the minority with Battle Royale. The story was an interesting one – last survivor stories always are – but I could not get into the way the story was told. There was too much repetition, the way we shifted into internal monologues was awkward, and I simply did not care about the characters. It’s a shame, because I was super excited for this story and it pains me to admit I wasn’t crazy about it.

In fact, there were times when I considered not finishing this one. It took me days to finish this one, because I kept putting it down and picking up another book. There were times when it was interesting, points where I was happy to power through, but as a whole my interest waxed and waned too much for me to love it. There were too many points when my interest vanished and I found myself wanting to skim in search of the next interesting point.

I can certainly see why this is favourite for many, but it didn’t quite do it for me.

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