Astonishingly I haven’t talked about books that I have read at all this year, my last one being Mister Creecher in December, so it’s nice to not only have finished a book but to be able to talk about it. And this is going to be an interesting one as I feel as if almost everyone in the world who is likely to read The Hunger Games has already done so, and I came to the book having read quite a bit already about the film version which will come out very soon.
I’m not really going to talk about the story as that’s kind of out there already because of the huge popularity of the trilogy and the film and the internet chatter about who is playing whom and what changes may have been made. And I suppose in some respects its difficult to give a full review to a book which clearly doesn’t stand alone; it ends at a point where you can guess that the story is going to take off in another direction.
I’m also aware of the criticism some have made of the author and whether she had or hadn’t read (or seen) Battle Royale which has similar themes (though I may not be competent to comment on as I haven’t seen/read it) and should therefore have acknowledged its influence.
So I read it with all this stuff in the background and the distractions perhaps made it difficult to get into the story but once I did get involved I really wanted to find out who was going to survive. It has real pace and some very interesting observations on how people behave when they are forced to fight not just for their own survival but the fate of their community as well.
Katniss is a very attractive heroine and there are some fabulous supporting characters, but it felt unfinished to me because it’s clearly part of a sequence and perhaps I can only really take a complete view when I’ve read the other two, which I fully attend to do. However, I did enjoy it and do want to know how the whole thing turns out.
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March 18, 2012 at 2:19 pm
Jenny
Alas, the series is a study in diminishing returns. I thought The Hunger Games was quite good, and the latter two much much less good — unfortunately. I love the cases where authors are able to keep the quality of the books solid all the way through a series — or where they’re sensible enough to do a one-and-done.
March 19, 2012 at 2:22 pm
Grace
Oddly enough, I liked the second book best because it steps outside of just Katniss and shows more of the political tensions found within the Districts.
April 10, 2012 at 12:38 pm
rosemurasaki
I found the third book very interesting, simply because it doesn’t tidy everything up in neat, predictable ways at all. I found the characters to be credibly conflicted, and their personalities – even those of some of the bad guys – are painted in intriguing shades of grey rather than as straight-up good or evil. It was darker, more ambivalent and more psychologically credible than the happy-ever-after denouement I was expecting – it’s possible that a lot of readers didn’t like it for the very same reasons I did.
April 10, 2012 at 2:25 pm
Grace
The only thing that I really disliked about the third book was what happened with Prim. I thought the encounter with Snow at the end though was very interesting; it made Katniss question whether she had helped installed a new government which wouldn’t be any different from the first.
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