Hiroshi SakurazakaReviews

A reasonably entertaining mixture of military sci-fi and Groundhog Day. As an audiobook, it was good company for household chores. Perhaps my expectations were too high, but I really cannot say more than that.

This is a smart, fast-paced, action adventure military sci-fi prose novel, which was the inspiration for the film Edge of Tomorrow. As one reviewer noted its basically Groundhog Day meets Halo except I would say that this is a rather serious look at the effects of war. The premise revolves around young recruit Keiji Kiriya who discovers that he’s caught in a time loop against the alien ‘Mimics. He is shoved into a suit of battle armor called a Jacket and is sent out to kill, only to die on the battlefield, then reborn each morning to fight and repeat the same battle. After each death he awakes on the eve of battle and attempts to progress future with the knowledge he’s previously learnt from the last loop. On his 158th iteration, he gets a message from a female soldier, the warrior known as The Full Metal Bitch, who might be the key to escape or his final death. Truly, as John Scalzi says on the cover: This is smart science fiction for the adrenaline junkie.

Thank goodness for the movie or I'd probably never have heard of the book.

Weird title.

Oh sweet mercy. A really well-written, well-illustrated manga that isn't 482 volumes long! It acutally finishes, hurrah! Well worth a read.

If you didn't know the story, you'd never be able to follow it in this jumbled up adaptation of the hit novel that inspired the not-quite-hit movie. Even if you know the story it's hard to follow here and I found myself disappointed by the flat art and flatter characters. Recommended only for completists.

I prefer to read books before they're adapted into films. I don't mind it the other way around. But reading the book first gives me a chance to establish the character in my head before seeing it on screen. When I started seeing previews for the film Edge of Tomorrow and discovered that it was based on this book, I made sure to snap it up ASAP. The premise sounded very interesting and I wanted to be sure to read the source material before Tom Cruise got too far into my head. I'm glad I did, because he's almost the exact opposite of the twenty-something Asian protagonist of the novel. On the other hand, he's so different that it would be difficult for anyone to mistake his world-weary fifty-something American character for the same guy. It will be interesting to see what bits the filmmakers kept and what they completely reinvented.

The premise is simple. As the film poster puts it: Live. Die. Repeat. This is basically Groundhog Day meets Starship Troopers. Keiji Kiriya is a fresh recruit in a war against alien invaders. He's thrown into battle, barely prepared, and comes to a pretty quick end. But then he wakes up and is pretty sure it was only a dream. Except he re-lives the events of the dream in startling detail until the sense of deja vu is overwhelming and only explanation is that it wasn't a dream. He's actually stuck in some sort of time loop.

Since this is translated into English from Japanese, it's difficult to know how much of the terse writing style comes from the original author and how much from the translator. I'm sure it's a bit of both. It fits the story and keeps the reader turning pages. It's very readable and I never felt lost. Description and introspection is applied appropriately. War is gritty, messy and painful. Soldiers are real people. Backstory is skillfully woven into unfolding events. The story keeps moving. I'm sure the word count puts this more into novella territory than novel, but there is plenty of character and story to make this a novel.

I really liked this book. It's well worth reading before Tom Cruise gets into your head.

Logical problems almost ruin this book. Somehow I still liked it.

With the rushed end I almost reduced it to 3 stars.

film > novel > manga

it took a while for this to get going for me. i really liked the back story of the creatures, and the ending. some of the gender politics were a little too backwards for my taste.

Fast, on the edge of your seat reading. Fascinating. Interesting. Great translation from Japanese. A little too much swearing, but they are soldiers. Intriguing science... lost me about 70% through in that regard, but still good.

I struggled with whether to rate this 3 or 4 stars. It certainly has some interesting ideas and some great set pieces but ultimately I just found I didn't make any kind of emotional connection with the characters.

this is the source material for the Tom Cruise action film Edge of Tomorrow. it’s fun to see the original story and how it was transformed into a feature length movie. the book is a very quick read, and has a different ending than the movie. def a fun read.

I liked this more then the movie which I'd seen before reading.

I've been on a particularly fun roll with the books I've read lately. A few months ago, it seemed to be stinker after stinker. But these past few weeks have made up for that. Really, really enjoyable books for the most part.

Then I read All You Need Is Kill, a novel I'd never even heard of until I watched Edge of Tomorrow, the movie based extremely loosely on this book. I loved the movie (as long as I ignored the last two or three minutes), so I was curious about the novel.

It has a lot of the same feel as the movie. The action is well done as are the characters. Even more impressive, the central premise of reliving each day after he dies is not a writing device I'd ever want to wrestle to the ground, but Sakurazaka does, and he does it with ease.

Other than that, there's much smarter reviews below mine. Go read them, because they discuss a lot more of the novel (and movie) and they have much wiser things to say.

For me, this was just another fun ride that I enjoyed the hell out of.

I enjoyed it, but I liked the movie better. I'd seen the movie first, and had become obsessed with it. I thought the book would follow the movie's plot. I think the book is good, but different. There were characters I didn't like who did things I thought were unkind. The book has a more rounded ending, I suppose, though I felt it was unnecessary. That might have been because I'd seen the movie, with the more fairy-tale ending, but what can you do?

This was good but my thing is this, the movie is better. This but was adapted into the Tom Cruise movie Edge of Tomorrow. I think that movie is better then the book it was adapted from. This reads like an idea for an anime which is not bad but it feels like it could be better to see in a visual medium. The characters are very two dimensional which speaks to the anime. The twists to the story aren't good. When you think about what happens near the end you realize that what happens to both the lead characters can happen to anyone. All of which can lead to the same outcome. That takes away from the story for me. Thus why I prefer the movie. It's self contained and gives you a satisfying ending while the book does not.

It was great up to the point where they start overexplaining every little bit of detail about the plot and characters and all mystery is gone.

What it does, it does well. Fast-paced military sci-fi with the usual hot-blooded soldierly prurience and detailed action sequences. Don’t expect deep characters or relationships and although the science-fiction is unique and somewhat persuasive, don’t be disappointed by the dearth of elaborate explanations (except for a minor infodump). After all, don’t forget why you came here. For kick-ass combat.

this book was shorter than I expected, but had some good values. read it before the movie ... as I know the movie won't do it justice.

HORRIBLE ENDING that makes almost no sense built upon a plot twist that also makes no sense. Other than that it's well written military scifi.

I heard about a movie based on this first, which was described to me as a kind of science fiction military version of Groundhog's Day, then about the book. I figured "What the heck -- having Tom Cruise in a movie shouldn't ruin the book."

I finished it in one sitting. I cared about the main character, I thought the premise was very well conceived (and, despite some superficial similarity, it wasn't much like Groundhog's Day at all), and the narrative tone was both engaging and evocative. The pacing was brisk. The ending was good, with a twist that makes so much sense it looks inevitable in hindsight (even as it might make you feel just a little sad for the protagonist). It's a really good military scifi story, but the real value of it for me wasn't either the military or the scifi. It's just a great read that I really enjoyed. Of course, military scifi tends to be that way, in my experience; maybe that subgenre just attracts good writers. Judging by how the military aspects of it feel, I suspect the author has read a lot of military science fiction and/or fantasy, and done a bit of research on what it's like to actually be in the military, even if I doubt (without having looked up anything about the author) he was ever in the military himself -- which would make the effort a pretty brave attempt to strike a note of authenticity without having lived in that environment.

If you're the kind of reader who complains that a book is "too dark" if people have unpleasant "on-screen" deaths that have a very personal effect on a first-person protagonist, avoid this book. It's gritty that way, and it doesn't deserve your poor ratings and reviews. The title should be a hint.

If you're the kind of reader who complains about strong language in a book, don't read this book (or any other military fiction worth its salt). All You Need Is Kill, like the actual military, is full of profanities, and doesn't deserve your poor ratings and reviews.

If you're the kind of reader who thinks "genre fiction" is beneath you because of some unreasonable belief that "unrealistic" elements of a genre make it impossible to tell a good story, provide a good character study, or otherwise act as a vehicle for some great writing, stay the hell away from this book. It doesn't deserve your pretentious, irrational biases mucking up its ratings and reviews.

I'm sure the Hollywood flick won't be anywhere near as good as the novel.

This was interesting and different. The protagonist is a soldier who fights alien invaders with a suit of armor known as a "jacket." His problem is that he keeps dying and then coming back to battle again. And then he meets the supersoldier known as the Full Metal Bitch. Why does he keep coming back? How exactly does it work? What does the FMB have to do with it? A strength in this novel is that the reason why the hero keeps coming back is revealed gradually. Sure, there is action and battles in this novel, but there is also some good character development and some interesting science fiction ideas. No, I am not revealing why it is he keeps coming back. Once you find out, I think you may find it intriguing as well.

When I first picked up the book, I thought it would be similar to Algis Budrys's Rogue Moon, which also has a hero that dies and comes back to life only to do it again. However, Budrys's protagonist does it in a different way, and he is not facing an alien invasion; he is exploring an alien artifact on the Moon. Still, if you have read Budrys, you will still find yourself making comparisons.

Overall, I think Sakurazaka is a writer I will be looking out for. I did not know he had other works, but I will certainly look for them. The novel was pretty good, and it was a pretty quick read as well. If you like military sci-fi, you will like this.

Very interesting story. The film version has more humor to it, but this version has more pathos. I'm not sure which I prefer. However, I will say that seeing the movie doesn't spoil the novel and vice versa.

Killing space starfish
so much harder than it sounds
practice makes perfect.

Since both the manga and the novel came out at almost the same time, and they're practically identical in every detail, I have to assume that it was only a publishing decision to release the manga (in Japan) several months before the prose. Not surprising, really, since most major fiction in Japan is manga.

Being an obsessive anglophile and a fan of the tale in all its incarnations, I wanted to nitpick any plot differences between the movie, manga, and novel. I didn't mind in the slightest that I was rereading the manga. In some ways, the novel was better if only because my mind is allowed to fly free with additional sensory input that doesn't quite exist in the novel. You know. Imagination.

It's a great military novel and the ending is great. I kinda wish that we could have skipped the hollywood ending in the movie, but damn.. you know, it's hollywood.

I'm going to recommend both this and the manga equally. There's no practical difference except in the amount of drawing.

It's one of the best nightmare versions of a daydream I've come across.