(For anyone who doesn’t know, a light novel is a kind of young adult novel in Japan. The ones I’ve read usually clock in just under 200 pages with pictures sprinkled in. If you hear that an anime has a novel linked to it, then chances are its a light novel.)
I found the Baccano! series through anime. Back when Hulu was still free to everyone, I would watch every decent anime dubs that I could get my grubby little paws on. (For anyone who doesn’t watch dubs, I was a busy college student tried from reading. At the time a good dub was a godsend.)
Baccano! was a spectacular find. It’s a nonlinear story that follows an ensemble cast of immortal mobsters in Prohibition-era New York. It comes with all the chaos and excitement you would expect from that setup. Despite it’s setting typical violence, Baccano! manages to keep things lighthearted with its humor and fun character. The dub amplifies the story with its fabulous vocal talents. Like plenty of other spectacular series, Baccano! only has 1 season and a handful of OVA(direct to video content).
So when the light novels finally got translated into English, I was quick to scoop it up. There main difference between the books and the anime is characterization. For example, Firo is a typical light happy-go-lucky shonen protagonist in the anime, but in the books, Firo has a sternness to him that the anime version lacks. The differences are really apparent when he shows little patience for the joke characters Isaac and Miria but in the anime he at least reluctantly humors them. I appreciate the amount of realism and relatability that these small differences in characters add to the books.
So far the story has been pretty linear, but a book or two will jump to a different place in the timeline. For example, book 5 takes place in 2002 while the others I own take place from 1931 to 1934 consecutively. While I did like how the anime jumped around to different times in a single episode, I find that I prefer a book that stays in the same general period.
One of the drawbacks of the series is that the writing can be weird at times. I can’t tell if this is due to being translated from Japanese to English, it’s a common writing style in Japan, or maybe it’s just how Ryohgo Narita writes, but it’s weird. Here’s an example of what I’m talking about:
He was wrapped up so well that the only things exposed were his eyes and moth, so in a sense, there was no real problem but…
“……………”
For several seconds, Edward was silent.
The Rolling Bootlegs, page 86
I’m sure all the ellipses were meant to show how much of a loss of words Edward was at, but we could understand that with just the narration. The redundancy of explaining a character’s dialogue is something that happens at some point in every novel in the series. It’s almost like Narita doesn’t trust the readers to follow what’s happening, but that doesn’t make sense because nothing else in the text implies this.
Regardless, I will probably keep reading the books. They are easy to read and the plot is fun. Sure the writing is a little stilted, but what YA book isn’t? The fact that the anime was able to take Baccano! make it a masterpiece with only minimal changes shows the strength of Narita’s story. If I had to rate this series it would be a 3.5 out of 5.
I Think Thinks 