39. The Hunger Games

39. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins (12/19/2011 - 12/20/2011)

I surprised myself by how much I ended up liking this book.  When I first started reading it, I did not enjoy it.  The general set-up of the book was riddled with cliches -- Katniss volunteering as tribute in place of her sister, her friendship with Gale, the death of her father and her subsequent taking over providing for her family,  her relationship with Peeta, her fellow tribute, etc.  Even the games I frankly did not find to be very original -- it just seems like a device that's been used before.  I tried to get past it, though, because reading The Hunger Games was an assignment from my future students -- I spent a day in my student-teaching classroom prior to the start of my semester teaching and my students said that, since I hadn't read this book, I absolutely had to before the start of the next semester.  So when I started reading this book, I had to remind myself that this is meant as a book for young adults -- younger readers don't have the same reading experiences that I've had, so they probably don't see the same cliches there that I do.

But by the time I actually got into the meat of the book, I was pretty impressed with the content.  I'm still not fully convinced that this plot is 100% original, but I did manage to get past it.  Katniss lives in a society ruled by the Capitol, a controlling and completely self-indulgent government that created the Hunger Games as a reminder of the power they hold over the 12 Districts that make up the rest of the country.  Each district must present one boy and one girl as tribute for the Games, which means that they get entered into a competition wherein only one person can or will survive -- that person must outlive or kill all the others in the Games in order to win.  Katniss's sister Prim's name gets pulled from their district's pool and Katniss volunteers in order to protect Prim's life.  Katniss and her fellow tribute, Peeta, are of course the underdogs of the Games, and they slowly rise to national attention as the preparation for the Games heats up.

All of these things I found to be pretty cliche-ridden, but the rest of the book is pretty awesome.  I don't want to give anything away, but I did read the rest of the series, so here is the Spoiler Alert: I will give away what happens.  If you as a reader of this blog do not want to know what happens next, stop reading RIGHT NOW and skip the next TWO POSTS, as they are about the next two books in the Hunger Games' series.

Katniss and Peeta of course manage to win The Hunger Games through a complicated time in the arena (I won't spoil the entire book); there is supposed to be only one winner of the Games, but it comes down to just Katniss and Peeta.  Katniss knows that, in a choice between having two winners of the Games to celebrate and entertain the Capitol and in having no winner, the Capitol will choose the two.  So Katniss proposes that she and Peeta eat poisonous berries and commit suicide; once the Capitol sees this choice (the Games are entirely televised, of course), they elect to have two winners.  The book ends in the crazy aftermath of their winning, which includes food and prizes for the entire District.

This ending was a dark turn that I was not expecting in a young adult novel.  The idea of manipulating the status quo happens in a lot of books, but from my experience, it seems to be a theme that young adult authors strongly avoid.  But this book took that challenge and went way beyond those cliches that filled the beginning of the novel.  So by the end, I was extremely impressed.  I would recommend this book, and the entire Hunger Games series, to any readers looking for something exciting that pushes the reader to think a little more deeply about what kind of life they really want and what they can accomplish.  Of course, to fully understand this idea, you have the read the entire series :)