Wow, what a ride that was! Part Groundhog Day and part Neon Genesis Evangelion, All You Need Is Kill is one heck of a sci-fi action novel. If it were Wow, what a ride that was! Part Groundhog Day and part Neon Genesis Evangelion, All You Need Is Kill is one heck of a sci-fi action novel. If it were all action and mech fights, I would only rate it a 2.5 stars, but because it contains one heck of a brain twister, I upped my rating to 4 stars. I already gave too much way by mentioning Groundhog Day (and I wish I hadn't read that about the book prior to reading it), but it really is hard to describe the book without saying that.
At first, I was a little offended by how sexist the book was in treatment of the handful of the women characters. But then the more I thought about it, the more okay I was about it. One of the bad-ass characters in here is a woman *and* the awesome battle engineer is also a woman, so that's a step forward, right? Ok sure, some of them are still described as the typical male fantasy of well-endowed, but I'll let it slide.
The writing in the translation isn't going to win any prizes, but it does what it was designed to do, which is to deliver fast-paced action. There was one section in the middle that breaks out of the voice used in the rest of the book to deliver lengthy explanation about the Mimics. That seemed unnecessary or at least clunky. I would have liked that information blended more into the meat of the book. I had originally thought the book was over explaining things, but at the end, I was thankful of that.
I read the last half of this right before bed and kept dreaming about it over and over again. It was pretty trippy and a little strange.
Spoiler about the Groundhog Day thing: (view spoiler)[It took me a while to wrap my head around the whole time travel thing and you know what? I'm okay with it. I usually hate time travel thing in books, but this one wasn't too bad and it kind of made sense. Sort of. I still don't understand who was looping and who was just living inside the loop at the end. At first, I thought it was Rita's loop since she had all the answers. If it was really Keiji's loop, then did the Rita in it already have the battle experience at the start of the loop? And if two people loop at the same time, are they just running in parallel? Breaking out of the loop is weird too. I'd think that both people would have to die to break out of the loop because if one still survived, that's still one antenna, right? (hide spoiler)]
Edit: I guess there's going to be a movie about this starring Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt? While I love Blunt and think she's a great choice for Rita, I'm not so sure about Cruise. Can't they at least find someone Japanese? I know Tom Cruise was in Last Samurai and all, but that hardly counts as Japanese....more
I never read any of the comics or watched the show on TV, so I don't know if this novelization is based on anything. What I do know is that it's a facI never read any of the comics or watched the show on TV, so I don't know if this novelization is based on anything. What I do know is that it's a faced-paced zombie book. It's like watching a zombie movie, but in book form. There's nothing new here. Nothing is really explained about how the zombies came to be or how one gets turned into a zombie. I did like the slow monsterfication of one of the main characters.
I was in the mood for something fast and exciting and this fit the requirements nicely....more
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