Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

I bought my copy of the Hunger Games at target for $7.19. After the first few chapters I worried I accidentally bought the dumbed-down discount version. Perhaps that acute sense of an overly pedagogic tone was my fault. I shouldn't be so quick to judge a book meant for the YA audience.  In that respect, the book performed wonderfully, almost brilliantly, as it laid out a story just gruesome enough to be fascinating, and just angsty enough to be relatable by someone who is just about to grow out of it.

 I am sure you know what the Hunger Games is about by now. The movie had the third highest grossing movie of all time. The book takes place in a far future when North America has been rearranged by a civil war into a Capitol and 12 outlying districts that support it. The districts are poor and the Capitol works hard to suppress them. One of their suppression tools is something called the Hunger Games, a romanesque game where 24 children have to fight to the death while the whole country watches.


I can see why teenagers go gaga over this stuff. Adults see the hunger games as a metaphor for the voyeurism that is our media, but I can tell the analogy hits a lot closer to home. The book is all about being watched, and the attempt to behave accordingly while you know that everyone around you is your potential enemy. That sounds a lot like MY high school, at least.

The movie missed surprisingly few things. One of which was Katniss's personal growth. She started the book with the assurance that she was a powerful young woman by the ability to support her family. She ended the book with the realization that sometimes she didn't understand her own feelings. The other thing the movie left out, quite  brilliantly I might add, was the last 40 pages of the book. The last 40 pages of the book acted as a segue to what I believe will be the drama in the second book. It would look silly in the last 10 minutes of the movie if they never made another one. The last 40 pages were about were where you realize that in the arena you at least that there were rules. There is no telling what can happen outside of the arena, when you don't have the assurance of a caring audience to keep things humane.

A notes on onw the books potential flaws. I don't understand her relationship with Cinna. That was one of the things I was looking forward to understanding after watching the movie. They seem to have such a deep and loving relationship without apparently having ever having anything to bind them together.

Overall it was quite fun to be wrapped up in the popular fiction hype. I look forward to my review of the second book in the trilogy, Catching Fire.


Trilogy Reviews
Read Review for The Hunger Games (Hunger Game Series #1)
Read Review for Catching Fire (Hunger Games Series #2)
Read Review for Mockingjay (Hunger  Games Series #3)