Reviews with content warning for Sexual violence - Battle Royale

This book will give you intense gore and action, and it will also give you a good exploration of many topics including survival, morality, and government. Where this book struggles is its approach to characters. It has 42 students all participating in this so-called "game", and the book tries to make you care for every single one of them being showing you all of their backstories. I get what the author's going for here, but it has this loop of "introduce character, show their backstory, kill them off", especially early on, and it's pretty repetitive and also the main reason this book is slow-paced enough to be 600 pages despite taking place over only a day. It's fine to have a slow pace and a large cast, and you should want the reader to care for your MAIN characters, but when your cast is this big and you try to develop all of them, you're going to have pacing issues because you're just not gonna be able to fit all that in one book.

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vintagesunkist's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark fast-paced

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

4.0

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aligorical's review against another edition

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dark sad tense fast-paced

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

3.0

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jrod9291's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional reflective tense medium-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? N/A

4.5

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whimsicalish's review against another edition

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dark sad tense fast-paced

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

4.5

Every time I picked it up, I had a difficult time putting it down.

"ehhh just one more chapter"
"well I can't leave it there, one more"
"hmmm it's only ten minutes past my bed time..."

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