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Battle Royale

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Battle Royale

By: Koushun Takami
Narrated by: Mark Dacascos
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About this listen

 In an alternative future Japan, junior high students are forced to fight to the death! L to R (Western Style). Koushun Takami's notorious high-octane thriller is based on an irresistible premise: a class of junior high school students is taken to a deserted island where, as part of a ruthless authoritarian program, they are provided arms and forced to kill one another until only one survivor is left standing. Criticized as violent exploitation when first published in Japan--where it then proceeded to become a runaway bestseller--Battle Royale is a Lord of the Fliesfor the 21st century, a potent allegory of what it means to be young and (barely) alive in a dog-eat-dog world. Made into a controversial hit movie of the same name, Battle Royale is already a contemporary Japanese pulp classic, now available for the first time in the English language. A group of high school students are taken to small isolated island and forced to fight each other until only one remains alive! If they break the rules a special collar blows their heads off. Koushun Takami's brutal, high-octane thriller is told in breathless. blow-by-blow fashion. Battle Royale is a contemporary Japanese pulp classic now available for the first time in English. Adventure Genre Fiction Movie, TV & Video Game Tie-Ins Science Fiction Suspense Thriller & Suspense
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Easily my favourite book of all time. A brutal story with lots of heart and characters you can really care about. It also happens to be incredibly well written and a breathtaking experience that has no equal. There isn’t a book that I would recommend more. The narration is excellent too.

Outstanding

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Such a great book with awesome characters. It has a strange mix of teenage innocence and violence that work brilliantly.

Outstanding book well narrated

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The performance of the story was really unengaging. There was no emotion in any of it and it felt like I was being read to by a robot a lot of the time. I wasn’t able to feel involved in the characters at all because I wasn’t being enticed to by the performance.
I am not sure if the issue with the story was due to translation or they stuck too closely to the original text but it was not good. There was too much repetition of what had just been said or what action had just taken place so no expectation of intelligence from the reader. There was also too much direct speech - sometimes it’s okay to use reported speech as this really helps to cut down on unnecessary words. I liked the premise of the story but was really disappointed in its telling.
Also, I found that the similarity of many of the names confused me and I didn’t always remember who was who - this I realise is a cultural difference though and possibly can’t be helped. Perhaps if I was looking at the names written down, this may have helped.

The story is a good one but the mixture of awful performance and shoddy translation ruined it

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Have to agree with other reviews here, the narrator lets the whole thing down. Stiff and robotic. Story is decent otherwise

Narrator is dull

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I like Mark Dacascos, I really do. He's not the world's greatest actor, but enjoyable to watch, nonetheless. That being said, he was the absolute wrong choice to narrate this. Battle Royale is an absolute masterpiece - literally Takami's only work, and Dacascos delivers it like he's got to read it out loud in detention and half-heartedly reads it begrudgingly every time the teacher leaves the room. It... it is not great. He doesn't seem to put any effort into it at all, which is a shame because Battle Royale is spectacular. Oh, well, top novel, though.

A literary masterpiece, let down by poor narration.

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