All You Need Is Kill - Hiroshi Sakurazaka

GoodReads Summary: When the alien Gitai invade, Keiji Kiriya is just one of many raw recruits shoved into a suit of battle armor and sent out to kill. Keiji dies on the battlefield, only to find himself reborn each morning to fight and die again and again. On the 158th iteration though, he sees something different, something out of place: the female soldier known as the Bitch of War. Is the Bitch the key to Keiji’s escape, or to his final death?

I admit I got this book because of "Edge of Tomorrow", which I watched before reading the book. As usual, only the concept of the story is the same in both. Apart from "soldier keeps repeating the same day over and over again due alien technology", there is absolutely nothing in common with the movie.

The story starts slowly, mostly because Keiji Kiriya is still a fresh guy. But he still kills one special alien and gains temporal superpowers. When that happens, the story picks up and it's really hard to drop it. Then the story stops to tell the backstory of Rita Vrataski and the pace drops a bit; then it goes back to the fight and it picks up again. That's probably how I read this thing so fast.

In a way, the book is more brutal than the movie, as much as "Jarhead" the book is more brutal than "Jarhead" the movie. Also, the explanation for the "time travel" -- which in the book is no time travel at all, being much more akin to the way Kitty Pride sends people in the time in "X-Men: Days of Future Past" -- seems much more plausible than the movie.

It is a short but interesting story, nonetheless.