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obnorthrup's review
4.0
Full of over-the-top action sequences, larger-than-life characters, and some rewarding, incremental world-building.
adamjcalhoun's review
4.0
Battle Angel Alita was definitely the most consistently weird book/manga I have read in a while. The essence of cyberpunk/biopunk, every panel in this manga has another STRANGE and weird image. The illustration gets better and better as the series progresses but unfortunately so does the fan service. In traditional manga fashion, the 'technology' and 'science' doesn't actually make any sense and often seems pulled out of a hat at the last minute. But worth it for the wild wackiness and sad loneliness of everyone in the desolate, post-apocalyptic, technology-driven future.
gio_shelves's review
3.0
2.5
liked the first two volumes a lot, but the rest was just so messy. nice art though.
liked the first two volumes a lot, but the rest was just so messy. nice art though.
_askthebookbug's review
5.0
Alita : Battle Angel.
~
Thank you so much for this copy @bloomsburyindia ♥️
~
Coincidentally I started reading this book on Women's Day and it turned out to be an apt read for the occasion. In this male dominated world, it's such a welcome change to see fierce women who are aware of what they want and don't settle for anything else. Alita is such a story of a young girl who blossoms into a powerful woman and takes down the world of evil.
~
In the junk of Iron City, Dr Dyson Ido, Cyber-Surgeon finds a beautiful head of a young cyborg girl among the heaps of garbage that's get thrown down from the floating city of Zalem. Iron City lives off the scraps of Zalem, both the cities a home for cyborgs and humans. When Ido fixes the young girl into a beautiful cyborg suit, he names her Alita after his dead daughter. Alita doesn't remember her past or where she came from and immediately seeks refugee under Ido. But what she knows is that she's strong with warrior like skills and so she sets out to know about her origin.
~
Alita is by far my favourite fantasy fiction female character and I have many reasons to justify that. Let's keep aside the fact that she's a cyborg but Alita is still a human from the inside. Her heart oozes empathy and compassion to those who are pushed down by the society. She takes down big cyborgs and bad guys gracefully and along the way she realises that she's an extraordinary warrior from Zalem who has a mission to achieve. This book is unputdownable once you cross few chapters and I managed to finish this in just two sittings.
~
The story is unique and I could almost relay it in my mind though I haven't watched the movie. The characters are wonderful be it the protagonist or the villains. I couldn't help but admire how female protagonists are always so intense and brave teaching all the girls out here how to not be apologetic for the way they are. One of the things that I learnt from Alita is how strong women can be if they set their heart to it. A truly fabulous read.
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4.5/5.
~
Thank you so much for this copy @bloomsburyindia ♥️
~
Coincidentally I started reading this book on Women's Day and it turned out to be an apt read for the occasion. In this male dominated world, it's such a welcome change to see fierce women who are aware of what they want and don't settle for anything else. Alita is such a story of a young girl who blossoms into a powerful woman and takes down the world of evil.
~
In the junk of Iron City, Dr Dyson Ido, Cyber-Surgeon finds a beautiful head of a young cyborg girl among the heaps of garbage that's get thrown down from the floating city of Zalem. Iron City lives off the scraps of Zalem, both the cities a home for cyborgs and humans. When Ido fixes the young girl into a beautiful cyborg suit, he names her Alita after his dead daughter. Alita doesn't remember her past or where she came from and immediately seeks refugee under Ido. But what she knows is that she's strong with warrior like skills and so she sets out to know about her origin.
~
Alita is by far my favourite fantasy fiction female character and I have many reasons to justify that. Let's keep aside the fact that she's a cyborg but Alita is still a human from the inside. Her heart oozes empathy and compassion to those who are pushed down by the society. She takes down big cyborgs and bad guys gracefully and along the way she realises that she's an extraordinary warrior from Zalem who has a mission to achieve. This book is unputdownable once you cross few chapters and I managed to finish this in just two sittings.
~
The story is unique and I could almost relay it in my mind though I haven't watched the movie. The characters are wonderful be it the protagonist or the villains. I couldn't help but admire how female protagonists are always so intense and brave teaching all the girls out here how to not be apologetic for the way they are. One of the things that I learnt from Alita is how strong women can be if they set their heart to it. A truly fabulous read.
~
4.5/5.
archytas's review
4.5
I read this as part of a reading challenge, for which I needed to find a book that has a movie based on it coming out in 2019. I loved Avatar, and knew that I wanted to see Alita: Battle Angel, so this was a no brainer. I'm a graphic novel person, but I've never really gravitated to Manga before, other than a brief infatuation with [b:Planetes, Volume 1|879090|Planetes, Volume 1 (Planetes, #1)|Makoto Yukimura|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1391393368s/879090.jpg|2191952]. So it is genuinely with surprise that I need to report I fell for Gunnm *hard*, while the movie left me feeling pretty *meh*.
It wasn't a love-at-first sight thing. The first storyline of Gunnm left me yawning a little, and not terribly invested in this world. The plot felt mostly like an excuse for fighting, and some of the more annoying manga tropes - a sexy female lead with no other women in sight, and a visual style that is all about whipping hair and big eyes, and world-building that seem unnecessarily weird, just annoyed me.
But from the second story arc, my infatuation grew. A story arc which comes across as painfully emo and irritating in the movie, is much more mature (and yes, darker) in the manga, the very ridiculousness and immaturity of the love interest driving the plot into more poignant, not less, territory. It takes a certain flair to introduce a love interest who hijacks and rips peoples spines out for money, and the shifting moral universe that Alita/Gunnm has to navigate moves to centrestage at this point, driving character development and audience engagement for the rest of this collection. As the action scenes decrease in frequency, Kishiro gets more innovative with panel layouts, and the simplicity and power of the art became a real draw for me. The book starts to draw (heh!) a much wider range of female characters, and the growing cast gives the sense of shifting understandings of goodies and baddies, what survival choices are acceptable and which are not, and even what strategies to create change are useful and which are not - and how you recover from a bad choice, and a devastating outcome.
And yes, it is still manga. So somehow this is explored through plots which are totally cheesy (but never predictable!), worldbuilding which is both very detailed and yet based on whacky ideas about technology, and not infrequent boobs (and abs) shots. The fan service was more mild than I expected, though, more gender equal than I expected, and not particularly irritating to me. YMMV. Oh, and a lot of whipping hair.
I honestly could care less if there is a sequel to Alita: Battle Angel, but I've already bought [b:Battle Angel Alita: Last Order (Omnibuses)|43514539|Battle Angel Alita Last Order (Omnibuses) (5 Book Series)|Yukito Kishiro|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1546995015s/43514539.jpg|67677477]. I haven't felt this invigorated around graphic storytelling for quite some time.
**Read for 2019 Reading Challenge #1. A book becoming a movie in 2019
It wasn't a love-at-first sight thing. The first storyline of Gunnm left me yawning a little, and not terribly invested in this world. The plot felt mostly like an excuse for fighting, and some of the more annoying manga tropes - a sexy female lead with no other women in sight, and a visual style that is all about whipping hair and big eyes, and world-building that seem unnecessarily weird, just annoyed me.
But from the second story arc, my infatuation grew. A story arc which comes across as painfully emo and irritating in the movie, is much more mature (and yes, darker) in the manga, the very ridiculousness and immaturity of the love interest driving the plot into more poignant, not less, territory. It takes a certain flair to introduce a love interest who hijacks and rips peoples spines out for money, and the shifting moral universe that Alita/Gunnm has to navigate moves to centrestage at this point, driving character development and audience engagement for the rest of this collection. As the action scenes decrease in frequency, Kishiro gets more innovative with panel layouts, and the simplicity and power of the art became a real draw for me. The book starts to draw (heh!) a much wider range of female characters, and the growing cast gives the sense of shifting understandings of goodies and baddies, what survival choices are acceptable and which are not, and even what strategies to create change are useful and which are not - and how you recover from a bad choice, and a devastating outcome.
And yes, it is still manga. So somehow this is explored through plots which are totally cheesy (but never predictable!), worldbuilding which is both very detailed and yet based on whacky ideas about technology, and not infrequent boobs (and abs) shots. The fan service was more mild than I expected, though, more gender equal than I expected, and not particularly irritating to me. YMMV. Oh, and a lot of whipping hair.
I honestly could care less if there is a sequel to Alita: Battle Angel, but I've already bought [b:Battle Angel Alita: Last Order (Omnibuses)|43514539|Battle Angel Alita Last Order (Omnibuses) (5 Book Series)|Yukito Kishiro|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1546995015s/43514539.jpg|67677477]. I haven't felt this invigorated around graphic storytelling for quite some time.
**Read for 2019 Reading Challenge #1. A book becoming a movie in 2019
saralynnburnett's review
4.0
Checked this out from Kindle Unlimited and Enjoyed this a lot more than I thought I would - definitely reading the rest in the series.
francomega's review
3.0
Picked this up when I heard Robert Rodriguez was making the movie. Good fit and should be a fun movie. The book is pretty good. Setting is your average manga cyberpunk dystopia with cyborgs and big-eyed killer girls. A lot of frantic artwork in the action scenes so I'm not sure what happened all the time but I think it was pretty cool.
andizor's review
3.0
I haven't read hardly any manga but I have seen a fair amount of anime. To me, this would have worked better as a tv show, rather than a manga. There was a LOT of action scenes, some where I found it difficult to tell what was happening, and a little story. I was hoping that there would be more story - maybe in subsequent volumes - who was Alita? Where did she come from? That sort of thing. But no. Oh well. A nice light read.
saf7d8c9's review
5.0
Interesting premise. It is nice see where different parts of the manga were Adapted into the live action film
erat's review
4.0
My first manga book! Not bad, not bad. I was told to start with this book because the series has an end (otherwise, I'd be committing to a lifetime of endless manga sequels, something that I guess turns some folks off to manga altogether). I'll go ahead and label this as slightly above young adult but not full bore adult in nature. The illustration style was actually quite good and very imaginative, and the story was unique if not overly challenging. All in all, a cool, easy introduction to manga. I'll definitely at least move on to #2 and see if the series is worth continuing.
Oh, and unlike other manga books, this one reads left to right. I thought I'd throw that in. I don't know how the whole right to left reading thing will hit me, but I'm about to find out.
Oh, and unlike other manga books, this one reads left to right. I thought I'd throw that in. I don't know how the whole right to left reading thing will hit me, but I'm about to find out.