6.02.2012
The Hunger Games
Series: The Hunger Games trilogy book 1
Overall Grade: A+
Some times books become popular because they really are good, entertaining reading. Though it's usually hard to tell until shut out the hype and sit down with the book. 'The Hunger Games' is one such book. It has help in the fact that it was written for teenage readers, so there's lots of action and forward motion of the plot, and little of the fluffy prose that one finds in "adult" novels.
As you have probably heard by now, the basic premise is that the protagonist, one Katniss Evergreen 16 years old, volunteers herself for the Hunger Games in place of her younger sister. The Hunger Games, run by the omnipresent rulers in the Capitol, collects two tributes, a boy and a girl, each year from each of the 12 districts and pits them against each other in a battle to the death. Katniss, who has been hunting to put food on her family's table for the past 4 years or so, is pretty good with a bow, but that still doesn't prepare her for the horror and cruelty of the Hunger Games. Nor does it prepare her to deal with the evoluting relationship between her and her fellow tribute Peeta.
The plot really does clip along in the this book, even though the Hunger Games don't start right away. Unlike may other YA books I've read, it was refreshing to have a teenage female protagonist so naive and innocent with respect to romance. Admittedly Katniss sees it as all a big calculation on how to win the favor of her sponsors and survive the games, but her perspective sees affection as just another possible tool and it certainly it isn't the be-all-end-all of her days and nights.
After talking with my brother (who has seen the movie but not read the book), it also became clear to me that movie suffers from losing Katniss's first-person narrative of everything. She provided backstory and anecdotes that are needed to flesh out the world of Panem, as well as set up the simmering unrest and seeds of uprising that must come to fruition in the next two books of the trilogy, since Katniss's Hunger Games are concluded by the end of this book.
Labels: genre: fiction, genre: scifi, genre: YA, media: book, series: Hunger Games
