The Hunger Games (Book 1)

Before you start down the long path of reading this series, pay close attention to the fact that the last book--[[ASIN:0439023513 Mockingjay]]--has received much weaker reviews than the first two books. That may not seem to matter now, but believe me--it will when you get there. The Hunger Games series is entertaining, but ultimately it leads nowhere. I won't tell you how the story ends, but I will say that any insight, redemption, or spirit that this book may promise will never arrive.

It is an empty tale. It's charming but vacant. It settles on the tongue like cotton candy, but never reaches your stomach. It will indeed leave you hungry: hungry for a story with some humanity, some depth. For that, try The Lord of the Rings, or the Chronicles of Narnia, or Harry Potter. The Hunger Games is not even in their league.

I regret spending my time on these books. I did enjoy them, most of the time, but in the end I like my stories to be more than cheap thrills and action. I like my action to have a heart beating beneath it. If you do too, keep browsing.

These books are fast-paced and easy to read, but speaking as both an English teacher and a hardcore lover of YA fiction, they are absolutely terrible literature.

The setting of a dystopian society wherein children are pitted against one another to the death in an annual melee ABSOLUTELY BEGS for a strong moral message. A message of humanity, hope, compassion, the darkness AND the lightness in each person, forgiveness, sacrifice, redemption... And the call is completely unanswered. There is no moral message that comes through, not for the characters and not for the readers.

I read and read, waiting for the characters to develop, to come to understandings, to break through and open up and help us, the readers, realize along with them that even if things are bleak and wretched there can be hope, we can still maintain our dignity and humanity and compassion. We can learn from our mistakes. We can be the better person. We can overcome.

Nope! Suzanne Collins instead makes the reader part of the audience to a sad and violent reality show where we're super excited and horrified to see who's gunna git killed next. The story is dark and depressing and shallow. Aaaand poorly written.

The crazy-hard moral dilemma of our would-be heroine Katniss - in which she must kill or be killed - should REALLY bring out some character-building, impossibly complex ethical predicaments, right? Again, no. When Katniss kills another child in the arena, we always feel that he really deserved it. He was an a-hole. He was dangerous. We all love us some good old fashioned black-and-white characters. Bad guys are always easy to kill. When Katniss begins to like one of her opponents and frets over the "one of us is going to have to kill the other" situation, the other character is killed off by one of the bad guys. Whew. Glad we didn't have to face that one. How frickin' convenient. And how horribly shallow and irresponsible. Instead of really digging into the obvious issue of "Dude, these are a bunch of kids fighting to the death for an audience and that's super horrible", Collins makes the fighting itself the focus and intrigue, rather than a platform from which to tackle real, deep issues.

Ugh. I just wanted these books to be so much more. But they weren't.

I read the both The Hunger Games and Catching Fire a couple years back, before Mockingjay had come out and long before this (undeserved) hype had started. I've always been an avid reader, so when I stumbled upon it at the library and it looked interesting, of course I took it home. Like anyone, I found the story fast-paced and compellingly told, but I didn't like much else about it. After I finished the two, they quickly left my mind, making no impression on me.
I only just got around to reading Mockingjay last week (I can't stand not to finish a series once I start), amidst the inexplicable amount of excitement about the series and the upcoming movie. Upon finishing it I made the decision, once again, that the Hunger Games is not a good series.

I have rarely encountered a character I dislike as much as I dislike Katniss. A comparison that comes to mind is Harry Potter's Professor Umbridge--and even then it's a different situation, because you aren't expected to root for Umbridge, while Katniss is the main character and the narrator of this trilogy. Katniss is cold, selfish, entirely self-serving, oblivious to the kindness of others, brash, vengeful, and truly cares about no one. All this, and in all three books I failed to see any character growth. She badly mistreats her mother, Peeta, and Gale throughout the series (and yet, Peeta and Gale both follow her like puppy dogs--this makes absolutely no sense as she has no redeeming qualities) and, although several times realizes it, does nothing to rectify her actions. Sickening, truly. Perhaps the best example of Katniss' absolute lack of character is at the end of Mockingjay when she votes "yes" for a final Hunger Games. While Peeta vehemently disagrees with the notion, Katniss agrees thinking only of revenge. Way to have some growth, Katniss, it's really endearing of you. To me, Katniss is an empty shell of a person. She is hardly the only person in Panem to have suffered hardship, so she should probably grow up and deal with things as a functioning human would. But Katniss seems to have no soul and hardly any humanity at all--and this is the heroine leading us through this acclaimed trilogy.

It's true that the series is fast-paced, compelling, exciting. But if one takes a step back to examine, at least, the first two books, what is it? Nothing but a weak, bare-boned story about a girl surviving in some woods by killing others in devious ways. The story of the revolution is very thin indeed in comparison to the graphic details of kids killing each other in cold blood. In other words...boring, brutish, and barbarian, just Katniss displaying her lack of moral character as she clings to survival. Yawn. But more disturbing, these books offer no redemption, no message of hope. Just blackness. It's unsettling and disturbing...and even more disturbing that so many people are considering this series so wonderful.

Yes, I know--the books are deeply symbolic, meaningful, brilliant. But not to me. To me they are nothing but a waste of paper concerning one soulless, selfish, unlikable girl and a whole lot of death. This series will never be anything to me, and the current hype around it is ENTIRELY undeserved. As for me, I'll never waste a cent on any part of this franchise--books, movies, or anything else. Brilliant? Please. If you want to read a really brilliant story, try something with a little more redemption and humanity.

I have held out on reading this dystopian society book for nearly a year because I truly hated the premise of teenagers killing other teenagers (the series was lent to me by a friend). Since she and I are going to see the movie tomorrow afternoon (well, I was going to the see the movie--now I'm not too sure I'll go), I figured I'd better finally read the book.
After finishing it, I am hard put to figure out why everyone (adults and teenagers alike) is so gaga over it. The violent premise of teenagers blithely killing other teenagers without a qualm (okay, I'll admit, not all of them--but enough of them), or the fact that the world is embracing this book where adults in charge are encouraging and exploiting such behavior--I don't know what I hate the most. Why do writers today think that a YA book has to be full of murder, mayhem, and violence (on the internet or in person) against each other? Yeah, I know that the main character and her fellow District 12 'Tribute' have no stomach for the Hunger Games and are chosen unwillingly; however, there are other teenagers in different 'Districts' that train for the Games since their early childhood--and volunteer willingly. Ergo, they kill willingly and without conscience.
I'm disappointed in our culture...which preaches that bullying is wrong, passes laws mandating educators to 'control' the propensity of some students to be mean and vicious to one another in schools, yet rave about books and TV shows (Glee comes to mind) that continually contain plots of said behavior being tolerated and or encouraged by the adults in charge.
On a side note, I hated the stilted, sophomoric writing as well. Oh well--I guess I should stop my rant and finally join the 'Old Ladies' club. Obviously that's where I belong.

I find myself at a loss to explain why so many people like this book so much. The premise sounds interesting enough, but it has been done before, is practically cliche in Japanese media, and Collins has not done it well.

The book is boring. Most of the first third is made of infodumps. They're not even well-executed infodumps. The writing style is simple and straightforward. Such a style can be fantastic when done right, but in this case it (with the exception of a few nonetheless forgettable passages) has no elegance or flavor; it's just plain boring, and it is incapable of rendering the infodumps anything more than snooze-inducing.

The plot is very predictable, and the author throws in a couple of plot twists that, rather than ramping up the tension, excitement, character development, or any of that, slaughter what little tension the plot possessed. They are deus ex machinas that save the main character from having to make the tough decisions one would expect from a book with this premise.

And the main character never has to make any truly tough decisions. She is never conflicted by anything except the book's contrived love triangle. Even when she is forced to kill, she feels little to no remorse. She just spends a sentence or two thinking about it with no particular emotion, and then forgets about it for the rest of the book. The author never lets her kill preemptively, only allowing her to act in self-defense, and her opponents are so poorly developed that the reader has no real reason to care about them.

The main character does not act consistently her age. At the beginning of the book, she acts in a reasonable manner for a sixteen year old subjected to poverty. But later in the book she seems more like a ten year old, both in the way she acts and in the way she is described (she apparently looks like a "little girl" in one particular dress, which is quite a feat considering her age). At almost the same time, she acts like some sort of hardened veteran in her utter unflappability.

All the characters are unflappable. For goodness sake, even the twelve-year old is unflappable. Where is all the emotional distress that should result from the threat of death and the necessity of killing innocents? From being suddenly and forcefully separated from family and friends? From being constantly monitored, starved, and injured?

Despite the book's unbelievability, predictability, and general terribleness, the second and third thirds of the book are admittedly somewhat entertaining. But still, I found myself skipping over large chunks of boring text even in the middle of the best of the action scenes. And the very best part of the book, the only part in which we are shown a relationship that feels relatively real, is all too brief. The mockingjays are cool, though.

I notice that many of the bafflingly few other low reviews cite the book's disturbingness as a reason for their low rating of it. I disagree with these people; this book needs to be more disturbing, not less. There's violence, but it is hardly graphic, and it happens to people the reader knows little to nothing about. This premise has so much potential for emotional turmoil, horror, and difficult decisions, but the book completely fails to deal with any of that and is presented in a sparkling clean and bloodless (and lifeless) manner. I actually find is disturbing how the book glosses over what should be a horrific situation.

In short, I have no bloody idea why people like this book so much. It's derivative, predictable, poorly written rubbish.

Either Katniss is a perpetual liar/unreliable narrator, or lobotomies were free for most characters.

#1. The hungry ignore how she gets food. Katniss says she's one of few who hunt--the rest haven't learnt archery or spear-throwing or fishing. They aren't desperate enough to creep outside the fence, where it's brimming with food and life. "Roots to dig, greens to gather, fish..." And even a strawberry patch! If Katniss' father--a regular coal miner--became a good hunter, why didn't the starving masses copy him?

#2. Katniss' dad would've made them rich. The food he'd fetched would have made him a lot wealthier than a miner, so WHY was he still mining, instead of hunting full-time?

#3. Hunger doesn't drive these people to boldness? "Even though trespassing in the woods is illegal and carries the severest of penalties, more people would risk it if they had weapons. But most are not bold enough to venture out with just a knife." (Pg 6). But the Peacekeepers "protect" successful hunters instead of punishing (shooting) them, and Prehistoric men turned sharpened sticks into spears to hunt and defend against sabre-tooth tigers! Desperate people would hunt like this to feed their children, or even with pitchforks. It's 74 years since the Games started, and hunting/gathering outside is STILL rare?

#4. Animals (meat) are safe inside D12? Katniss tells us there's a lot of livestock INSIDE District 12 and that all are apparently safe from being stolen and roasted. Pigs (Peeta's), goats (Prim's & Goat Man's herd), cattle (the soup lady will tell the Peacemakers her soup is beef), horses (to pull the wagons), sheep (Katniss trades for wool), and enough leather for shoes, jackets, etc. Yep, starved coal miners and orderly teens limp past Prim's goat on their way home to their starving families every night and ignore it!

#5. Everyone's a lawbreaker, but they're terrified of breaking the law? The reason Katniss gives for the above is that it's against the law to steal, the punishment being death, which would be scary if they weren't being killed slowly, anyway. And she *also* says, "...and who hasn't broken the law?" Whiplash! Which is it? 200 years ago in England, the poor knew they'd be sentenced to death or shipped to hard labour in Australia for being caught stealing bread or hunting on private property, but hunger twisted their arms.

#6. Starving people don't make their own veggie gardens? Outside the fence are potatoes, carrots, beets, parsnips, turnips (roots), berry bushes, leafy green veg, herbs and strawberries, all growing hardily without human nurturing, so the seeds/cuttings are right there to cultivate from! Pg.34 has Peeta's yard with a "garden bed, not yet planted for the spring" and Pg.42 K's hungry mother grows herbs, so growing food is legal in D.12 and no one is persecuted in any way for it. Why isn't the whole of D12 swollen in greenery from these hardy crops?

#7. Katniss is well-fed but hungry, poor but sells what everyone wants? She says she still goes to bed hungry at times, so hungry she's needed to put her name in the Hunger Games hat extra times every year for grain and oil. Yet she *also* says their goat (her "gold mine"!) provides so much milk for them to drink that they occasionally have enough left over to make cheese, and that she brings food, including meat, home on a daily basis (Pg.377).

#8. Miners that keep the Capital running on coal are so hungry they can't mine? If the above is true, then miners go to bed even HUNGRIER than Katniss, every SINGLE night, thus they're seriously frail, endangering D.12's ability to dig coal for their overlords = the main theme is a PLOT HOLE!

#9. The Capitol doesn't care about production? A place of technology and comfort, they use electricity (from coal) to maintain that lifestyle. Understandable. The other districts would also be heavy electricity users for their different productions, so coal would be in VERY high demand since no other fuel is being produced. Wouldn't PRODUCTION be the overlords supreme goal? Fear of the Capitol is a done-deal already, since all children must have their names in the hat for the Hunger Games. So the Capitol doesn't have to shoot itself in the foot by having workers who can barely walk in order to maintain control.

#10. Miners with serious illnesses keep the Capitol running? Living mostly on grains and oil would mean these precious workers are severely deficient in Vit.C = scurvy (weakness, anemia, bleeding organs, heart disease), folic acid (anemia, irritability, memory problems, manic depression, bone fractures, low libido, fetal problems) and iron (fatigue, difficulty maintaining body temperature, decreased immune function, anemia). HOW ARE THEY REPRODUCING, let alone working?

11. Given the laws of supply and demand, Katniss would be wealthy. She is one of just a few who are selling the rarest and most desired product to eight thousand people (including the wealthier Peacekeepers) who are all desperate for her meat. However, she trades this commodity that's hundreds of times more valuable than the meat in our stores today, for shoelaces, wool, bread or salt. Lobotomy! Even the organs/heads/feet would fetch high prices! Her mother, being a supposed healer, should know that broth made from boiling fish-heads is an iodine-rich remedy for energy/illnesses, and boiled bones/hooves makes a gelatine and mineral rich broth that boosts the immune system, is an anti-inflammatory, a hormone regulator, and for skin and joint/tendon health. The people in D.12 would *greatly* need these remedies!

#12. Where does she find the time? Every day, Katniss goes to school, hunts in the mountains, sells/trades her extra food in the Hob (where she "makes most of her money") and (I assume) guts and skins her kill for her mother to cook.

#13. The overloads care about schooling the kids (up to 16, at least) they starve and deny futures to. The Capitol pay teachers and other staff while providing classrooms, "sports activities" (Pg.13), and "music assembly" (Pg.366) for children who could otherwise be mining. Poor kids as young as 4, in the Victorian era, were uneducated and mined coal under a MUCH less sinister government. "Somehow it all comes back to coal at school. Besides basic reading and maths, most of our instruction is coal related." Why do non-mining kids, like the Mayor's daughter & Peeta, have to know all about it? Why do future miners even need to know anything about coal that can't be taught on-the-job? Moreover, why do *they* need to be taught even basic reading and maths by their evil overlords?

#14. Or ARE good futures produced from this schooling? Katniss lectures Prim about staying in school on page 42, as if it can improve Prim's future, as if it's a choice Prim has not to go. Yet this is supposed to be a place where mining coal is people's main avenue for income...after the age of 16/17.

#14. Why didn't Katniss give Prim advice to help her life without her? "Prim, forget school that'll get your nowhere. Make and tend a big vegetable garden of berries, greens and roots. That'll be your carbs, so you don't need to enter the Hunger Games for grain rations! Mom, teach Prim reading and maths, and tend the garden with her. Gale, can you trap some baby rabbits for them to breed their own, easy meat in cages over grass?" (since no one would steal them). "With the money you get from selling extra food, buy more goats to sell milk and cheese, too." In fact, why weren't they doing all this all along? Why weren't others? Ah, those darned lobotomies!

#15. Did I miss a law for dark haired, grey-eyed people to mine, or else? What about all the other jobs needed in D12? The majority of D.12 are supposed to be coal miners who get paid very little for their hard, dangerous work, yet there's plenty of other jobs they could do (and that would NEED doing! So...each new generation of coal miners choose not to be meat-hunters, bakers, butchers, teachers, prostitutes, pub staff, Moonshine producers, grave-diggers, police/peacekeepers, staff of the Mayor, fruit growers & dryers (raisins on Pg. 37), hide-tanners (all that leather), fabric producers & dyers (for pretty dresses, "pink" ribbons, trousers, blouses, babies' diapers, sanitary pads, etc--What do they make it from? Cotton? Hemp?), cotton/hemp farmers (unless these starving people can afford to import all that in), animal farmers (pigs, sheep, goats, cattle, horses), wagon builders (pg.48), clothes washers, wool spinners, makers/importers of school & office supplies (paper, pencils, chalk, text books?), herbalists/healers (Katniss' mother), soap or toothbrush producers, black-market businesses, carpenters, plumbers, electricity company workers, electricians, electric bulb & wire & switch manufacturers, steel workers (knives, fences, pots, ovens, nails, sewing needles), guards for herds of livestock?, shoe/boot-makers, garbage men (rubbish bin's emptied on Pg.34), etc, etc.

#16. The Capitol called the games "HUNGER" yet they don't want any of the hungry to believe any of them are so hungry they actually die from hunger. HUH? Pg. 33: "Starvation is never the cause of death officially. It's always the flu, or exposure to pneumonia. But that fools no one."

#17. Which district pumps oil? The amount of fuel to make and transport all these products of "industries" back and forth across the country means fuel needs are immense. They have hovercrafts, trucks, tractors and trains... I thought the trains, at least, must've been coal-produced-electric (given their high speeds), but then the train on page 540 stopped for "fuel"! Not even trains today do that (electric). Soooooooooo...?

#18. THE WRITING.
So many adverbs. So many cliches ("silent as a stone" + "fresh as a raindrop" + "chilled to the bone" + "shaking like a leaf"). So may dialogue tags. If it's just two people in a conversation, we know who's speaking after the first dialogue tag/action beat! This drove me nuts:

"Yes, there's usually some," I say.
"Katniss, it's just hunting. You're the best hunter I know," says Gale.
"It's not just hunting. They're armed. They think," I say.
"So do you. And you've had more practice. Real practice," he says. "You know how to kill."
"Not people," I say.
"How different can it be, really?" says Gale grimly.

THE GOOD...................................

Indeed, I thought there were a lot of good things in tHG, despite all the above. I really liked the author's prose and pacing. The "little duck" comments in the beginning with Prim were so cute and creative, I was drawn in right away. And the cat and her hating each other got my attention as well--very unique. I loved the creativity in how simply the author wrote, "Entrails. No hissing. It's the closest we'll come to love." These are what spurred me to click "buy now" ASAP. Loved having a strong female lead who wasn't bitchy or whinny! I think this confuses a lot of writers who aim for strong, but Katniss was created with talent. The rare trope/pairing of "Masculine Girl, Feminine Boy" made the read more interesting, and I think that, too, took talent to pull off. The characters of Gale and Prim were my favourites, and I got teary just reading the Kindle sample where Katniss substituted herself in Prim's place. After the sample is where it went down-hill for me--leaving district 12 and the characters I was most invested in.

Personally, I would have found it a fascinating read without the Hunger Games, but rather a story of how they cope in District 12 (minus lobotomies!), how their survival progresses and how their relationships grow and are challenged in that interesting setting.

Everyone around me has been talking about this book and I finally got a chance to read it. I burned through it in less than a weekend, but I found myself wanting to like it more than I actually did. The plot went extremely fast (and normally I read quite slow), but to me there was no depth to the story. Each revelation the main character had seemed forced to me. I felt like I was constantly being told this or that fact was important, or the main character felt this way without the prose actually making me *feel* that way. It was just too much telling and not enough showing. Also, the dialogue throughout (epsecially between Peeta and Katniss) felt so stilted and rang very untrue to me. Often sentences were confusing and sometimes scenes transitioned so quickly it was confusing I had to read over a passage a few times. (It seemed on more than one occasion that Katniss had spent her last arrow, when in the next scene she was reloading her bow.) There was even a typo in my copy.

***SPOILERS***

I was expecting a more literary story (i.e. more thematic symbols--more could've been done with the mockingjay pin and the fire symbology, both missed opportunities on Collins's part. The ending was a pure cop out: more could've been done to push the characters to their absolute limits and examine how far one really would go for survival. It seems counterintuitive to say so, but there were so many cop outs in this plot, so many "deus ex machinas", that I grew frustrated with the believability of the plot. Just when things seemed to get really juicy, the diffcult option was removed from Katniss's (and Peeta's) choice of options--every time she was in a position to have to kill a character she cared about, some outside force came in and killed them off. (Rue, Thresh, Foxface. Even Cato's death was more of a mercy killing.) Imagine how profound the story would've been if she had to have allied with Rue and then have been forced to kill her in cold blood later on. That's exactly what I was expecting when I started reading this book--I couldn't imagine it any other way than that she'd bond with the other children and then be forced to kill them, and then deal with those emotions. Instead she got off the hook emotionally each time, and the story just felt flat to me because of it. I really wanted the story to push her to her psychological limits in addition to physical limits. She just made out too easily for a dystopian story centered around kids killing each other. If she had been forced to kill Peeta, the story would've had some real weight to it. (Though I suspect he's been kept alive mostly to set up a love triangle in the next book.) The "stay tuned for Book Two!" ending only added to the frustration. There is just no comparison to 1984 or The Giver, stories with real emotional weight, philosophical ideas, and more artfully-crafted prose. I suppose the trend now is to have supposedly "dark" stories that are only dark in regards to action and plot, but lack any true psychological weight, and whose characters act coolly under pressure (except for a few obligatory tears) and emerge from the story unscathed in any profound sense. (Who can forget Winston turning into coward at the end of 1984 and how his character is broken as a result?)

All in all, I feel this book had nothing to say about humanity. There were glimmers of a theme, especially from the mouth of Peeta when he talks about dying his own terms, and when Katniss makes her first kill--but those themes are dealt with so briefly and then it's back to the action. Peeta and Katniss feel more superficial towards the end of the story--I can't get any real sense of how they've changed after the Hunger Games, if at all. We are only told in the exposition that Katniss feels different, but we are never quite shown how. Same goes throughout the book--we are told some things are significant, but without any backstory, we can't feel how important they are. Why is Katniss's decorating Rue's body with flowers such an act of defiance? We are told after the fact that communication between Districts is forbidden. Had we been told (or better yet, shown) that *beforehand*, the scene would've played differently. There were just too many examples of events happening, then being told they were important after the fact. Considering this is a best-seller, I was really surprised at the low quality of the writing style, even in regards to such basic things as scene transitions. There were also a few elements that just seemed thrown in--like the muttations, that took more away from the story than added to it. And must every YA book these days be written in first-person present tense?

A real disappointment and missed opportunity. I really wanted it to be better after all the good things I heard about it.

The Hunger Games would be much more palatable if this story were original. It is not. I read Battle Royale a few years ago and greatly enjoyed the entire experience. I'm a high school teacher, and my students have been raving about The Hunger Games. While I was aware of the comparison to Battle Royale I thought I'd give the story a try, wanting to judge it on its own merits. I came away sorely disappointed.

The storyline is virtually identical to that of Battle Royale. This is concerning for two reasons. First, it is glaringly unoriginal. Throughout the story, I kept hoping for the plots of the two books to diverge onto separate paths. This did not happen in any sustained way. The political environment, the setup in the arena, the writing about the Games, the love story, they have all been written before and given much more articulate and compelling treatment. Second, it is written in an inferior manner to Royale. I could forgive the "plot inspiration" were the author to exhibit exceptional literary skill. Unfortunately, Ms. Collins disappoints. In fairness, the one element that I appreciated from Games was the preparation process. This diverged to a significant degree from Royale's plot, and made me quite hopeful for the arena. I sped through those pages hoping for more originality, yet, found none.

As other reviewers have mentioned, the arena scene, virtually two-thirds of the book, fails to offer the main character any moral dilemma. This frustrated me to a great degree. The author constructed a story arc with which she could really play with morality and emotion. Instead she included a contrived, poorly written, and uninspired love story. The main character feels, in this reviewer's opinion, almost a bystander to the main conflict.

Now, I'm not a young adult, but as a teacher of young adults I find the acclaim of such a one dimensional work truly frightening. While I'm excited to see young people reading anything (anything is better than no reading), I feel that their age group is missing out on something more. For those young people discovering reading, the premise of the story is irresistible. Sadly, the conclusion of the story leaves me wishing that I had reread Battle Royale. This could have been a novel headed for the English cannon. Instead, it will go the way of the Twilight series, fading into irrelevance, as its readers mature.

How does the experience of reading Hunger Games compare with an equivalent number of hours at the joystick playing Mortal Kombat? Well in Mortal Konbat, the plot twists are likely more probable, the internal logic more consistent, and the underlying moral value somewhat more lofty. At least the online gamer slaughters relentless hoards of mutants or beefy professional mercenaries. He is not asked to participate in the killing of unarmed innocents that he has come to like, and then fault them for their deaths. At least one among the "career tributes" (game-victims) is a psychopath. This is Cato. He says of our heroine "When we find her, I get to kill her in my own way, and no one interferes." We are invited to hate Cato and to celebrate his death. This is a most unfair device it seems to me for it shifts blame for the game's atrocities to one of its victims. Cato by the way is killed finally by a pack of zombie dogs that are the reincarnated children who have been murdered earlier in the game.

Let me say it differently. If killing Cato by calling up murdered children from the dead and reincarnating them as a pack of zombie dogs is a satisfactory resolution to the novel's central conflicts and themes, then what are the novel's central conflicts and themes? What is the crime that justifies--in moral terms--such terrible retribution? There is none because the dogs have no judgment. The dog pack is not an arrow aimed with some clear intent; it is a bomb set off in a crowd. The dogs would have killed Katniss just as quickly as they did Kato. It's simply random and mindless murder without purpose.

Among the other dead, one is a young girl who's been nicknamed Foxface. Any girl called Foxface by other girls deserves to die, does she not? No one need cry for her. Or so Collins would have it. Here's the female tribute from District 1 before the slaughter: "With that flowing blonde hair, emerald green eyes, her body tall and lush, she's sexy all the way." Oh, she's wearing a see-though gown by the way. We have several of these titillating beauty-contest moments in the book that are presented without any sense of irony or cynicism.

So let's be clear. Suppose you are presented with two works of imaginative art--both artists being adults. The first is a pen and ink drawing of two children engaged in a pornographic act. The second is a passage from a novel that graphically describes one child killing another. Sensing where I'm headed with this, you might stop me with the complaint, "But that's unfair. The passage is taken out of context. The killing takes place in a work of fiction with overall artistic value." But does it? The charge I'm so clumsily making is that the tone of meritorious futuristic or fantasy fiction is a masquerade that makes the pornography of death palatable.

The troublesome question is then, is Collins herself the faceless Gamemaker of the novel? It seems so. It is she and she alone who designs and inflicts the injustices and the abuses and the deaths of children simply for the entertainment those grim outcomes provide. Collins seems a statistic bully.

Disturbing content? Ok, well it's violent, but it lacks the credibility to be truly disturbing. And deeply thematic? Gimme a break! "Killing is bad." "Freedom is good." Ta-dah! Hardly revolutionary or even really interesting. Read any number of other and better dystopian novels - like Ender's Game, Catch 22, 1984 or Paradise Lost. They have the thematic nuance, subtly, and multi-layered development both in plot and in character to make them classics.

A little research and some attention to detail rather than the inclusion of prolific violence and an adolescent (thematically speaking) love triangle would have done wonders for this book. Geez! Her half-attempt to make a statement about Roman gladiators is truly laughable. For example, she has little to no concept of the history of the Roman names she's included, and then failed to give interesting names to her main characters!

The Hunger Games is like a violent version of a Nicholas Sparks novel. This is dystopian allegory for those with little or no academic background. All in all, completely forgettable. To be honest, I only finished it because I was required to do so for school.