The Hunger Games

In March our book club elected to read The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins and I’ll be forthcoming and admit that I was not thrilled. I have a devious little streak in me that avoids whatever books are selling really well because I don’t want to buy into the hype. The problem is, if my readers will remember from an earlier post, sometimes there’s hype for a reason.

As it turns out I read the entire trilogy in ten days. They were totally absorbing. I cried. I despaired. I gasped aloud. The story was just terrible enough to be appalling, romantic enough to be hopeful, and set in a futuristic place that nonetheless was familiar enough to make is scary. And they must have been well-written because I didn’t notice otherwise.

I appreciated the appeal of the stories to boys and girls, and ultimately, to my husband who is not a terribly interested reader. His comment was that he knew they must be good because all his 8^th graders were reading them (not just the girls), and so were all the teachers. I was pleased that he read them along with me and we had a great time sharing the suspense.

In the end, middle school would be my threshold for young people to read these books. The themes are pretty violent and I would want to make sure my child had the cognitive capacity to process the story somewhat politically. Without that they revert to a “Team Peeta vs. Team Gale” romance fixation that seems to have begun with the Twilight series (a bandwagon I don’t think I’ll get on). This is too bad because the author didn’t sexualize her at all, that wasn’t the point of the story. If not that pitfall, children may fixate on the violence and not be able to comprehend the story at all. I wouldn’t want this either.

I highly recommend this series, particularly to folks who are into dystopian literature, political uprisings or coups, or if they’re looking for a female protagonist with grit. I’m not buying many books these days but this is a series I will absolutely read again.