I first heard of “The Hunger Games” a few years back and I heard it was quite readable. As with most books though, I was forced to put it on the bottom of my reading list as being a literature student makes leisure reading a myth. I however got a Blackberry Playbook for my birthday and learned the joy that is eBooks. You can take them anywhere with you and they aren’t bulky. So I decided to test out my electronic reading with “The Hunger Games”.
I knew about the basic premise going in and that the series is adored by millions over. I initially feared it would be a reading experience similar to “Twilight”, mainly due to it’s categorization as “young adult fiction”. Young Adult Fiction (or YAF, as I will call it) has always thrown me off. I essentially skipped this phase in my reading evolution. Instead of going from “The Hobbit” to “Artemis Fowl” to “The Lord of the Rings”, I skipped the generic action-cliche-riddled/bloated-terrible book and went straight to “The Lord of the Rings”. I only really went back and read YAF when I hit University and started taking Children’s Literature courses.
“The Hunger Games” starts off interesting enough and I can see why so many love it. Katniss is an engaging character to follow and Collins writing style is simple and compelling. Her descriptions and explanations allow us to picture exactly what she wants the reader to see and understand. The descriptions are usually not as repetitive as those in “Twilight”, often because such descriptions are vague in nature or do not exist. I don’t mind this overall as it allow the imagination to run wild, but at the same time some things like those lizard-creature things remain unrecognizable in my mind.
I guess I’ll go book by book:
“The Hunger Games”
Katniss begins off being a good big sister to Rue Prim and saves her life when the nefarious capital draws her name to fight to the death in the Hunger Games. The Hunger Games themselves are an interesting concept (I don’t give a damn if it’s unoriginal, nothing has been unique since Aristotle) and a dystopian society is needed to be able to make them seem plausible. The first book does the dystopia the best mainly because the sense of mystery between them allows the reader to be able to pretend the system makes sense. As the series progresses, and the Capital is further explained, the dystopia makes less sense but simply having it as a setting in the first book is great.
I enjoy the games and the training leading up to it. The media frenzy around the Hunger Games is my favourite aspect of the series as it is something that is seen in contemporary society. I’ve watched every episode of “24” and it certainly was not for the love triangles (I’ll get to this in a bit). People love watching violence. Was anyone really upset when Hamlet died? Did many people tune into however many “Saw” movies for the character development? Collins really tackled this issue nicely and really questioned the inner sadist in all of us who are willing to “vicariously live while the whole world dies”.
One of the biggest strengths as well as weaknesses has to be Katniss Everdeen as a narrator. It is nice to see a female character actually be strong in a YAF novel. She is not just a woman in a male role but a young girl forced to survive and take care of her family. However, Katniss is omnipotent about society. All the blanks of the world are filled in as Katniss knows everything about everything unless it is important to the plot for her not to know. It is also an annoying faucet for all the symbolism and parallels in the book to be explained directly. Every time Rue is mentioned Katniss instantly draws a comparison to her sister Prim. This lasts the entire series and it gets tiresome very fast.
Overall, I enjoyed “The Hunger Games” and I would recommend the book to people if they want a solid and fast-paced read. It’s no literary masterpiece but you can do worse. I’d give it a 7/10.
“Catching Fire“
I have to give credit to “Catching Fire” for two things. 1.) It actually feels like a sequel more than a tacked on story and 2.) Katniss’ omnipotent narration makes sense due to her experiences. The Victory Tour is a great concept and the events during it make logical sense in this world. The characters feel familiar and real and the story is compelling. This disappears fast. Logic goes out the window once the story goes from “the citizen vs the government” to “Katniss vs Snow”. This simplification of a complex society really weakens a lot of familiarization the story could potentially have to the real world. It is just like if the Trayvon Martin case went from being an issue of the deep rooted ethnocultural conflicts within America to George Zimmerman and Barack Obama getting into a boxing match. With an easy solution to societal problems, the issue must not have been complex and I find that very wrong when dealing with real world issues, especially when they were fleshed out so well in the first book.
The second thing that really irritates me about the book is the love triangle. Gale or Peeta. WHO WILL SHE CHOOSE?!?! Well Gale is nice, brave, charismatic and strong willed and Peeta is nice, brave, charismatic and strong willed so it is a tough choice. The only thing differentiating these two at this point is simply their circumstances. The one good thing about making a love triangle focused on two completely similar characters is that it’s hard to guess who she will end up. I will give the series credit for this despite my bitter hatred for the love triangle trope.
Highlights of the book for me was the Victory Tour and the moment that Katniss found out she was going back to the arena. The characters still felt human in this book and the motivations still made sense. I just started to lose interest once they began to repeat the exact same twists as the first. The ending was good and I can see myself being really annoyed by the wait if I read it when it first came out. It wasn’t awful, but it wasn’t good either. A purely average book 5/10.
Oh! The bird’s a metaphor!
“Mockingjay”
I’m not going to beat around the bush. I hated this book. There was nothing at all about it I enjoyed. It made grammatical sense which is a step up from “Fifty Shades of Grey”, the book I am currently enduring, so I guess that’s something. The book feels rushed and it fails to bring a decent conclusion to the story of Katniss, who I was actually enthralled by at the start of the series.
From the beginning, the book has a completely different tone than the other two. It goes from a “us vs them” attitude to “me vs Snow, only because he has my boyfriend” attitude. District 13 is not engaging, and the new characters thrown at us aren’t either. We are shown many different war-torn settings in various subplots that do not amount to anything. Katniss already has the fuel to fight the war and all these plots do is delay the story from progressing for no reason at all.
Every character goes from three-dimensional to two-dimensional (in the case of Katniss) or two-dimensional to one-dimensional (in the case of everyone else). The only thing engaging about the plot at this point is seeing how it ends as opposed to seeing how the world operates. This removes the point of having such a focus on the dystopia. Notice how in “Star Wars” there was clearly a dystopia but they didn’t waste their time depicting it? All “Mockingjay” does is depict this world but since the characters lose any resemblance of what they were like in the previous books it makes it hard to care.
The final act seals my opinion of the trilogy being non-recommendable. Prim (who reminds Katniss of Rue), for some reason shows up in the final strike and dies a horrible death. This triggers a psychological response from Katniss and the rest of the book/trilogy is spent with her dealing with her mental state of being despite it never being a focus before. Too little, too late. Katniss defeats Snow by defeating Coin who for some reason thought it would be a wonderful idea to end the revolution by creating a dystopia similar to the one they overthrew. I understand the notion of history repeating itself, but this is pushing it. Coin does not become drunk with power, Coin instead thinks it’s a great idea to continue the Capital with no reason at all.
Katniss picks Peeta because he’s there. So romantic. The epilogue shows that they have children but Katniss is scarred by her experiences. This would have been nice if there was any focus on the psychological impact of this society in the series. Maybe if Katniss stopped thinking about how much Rue and Prim were the same and which boy she found dreamier she could have really thought of the consequences of this world and allowed for a stronger ending to happen.
This book was not compelling. I regret reading. I give it a 2/10 due to it’s proper grammar and spelling. It may be one of my least favourite books ever.
This may beat it though, I’ll post about it in a few days time.
Overall, I don’t feel reading these books were a waste of time. I can see why many people love these books and I appreciate the trilogy for that. I would recommend reading the first book to anyone but I’d be skeptical to say anything beyond that. It’s an interesting bit of pop-culture and it has good intentions. I am interested to see how some of the parts of the trilogy will transfer over in the upcoming movies. You won’t see me first in line however.
I give the trilogy a 5/10. Average overall, leaning towards good if it were not for my hatred for the third one.
I may stand in line due to my love of Jennifer Lawrence, however.
Bear Pursuit 
