I enjoyed the books casually - the first moreso than the other two. But I’ve commented that if I were a 15 year old girl, or had ever been one, I might have enjoyed them more. Especially in the last two books I kept having trouble getting past how stupid and self-absorbed Katniss seemed (not that she didn’t have reasons to be a psychological wreck).
I also got a strong John Christopher vibe, as a previous poster said.
I read all three books in four days, loved them. Have not yet seen the movie.
I know it deviates from the norm, but I loved the third book just as much as the first two, in part for the reasons it bothered you. The first book creates a heroine - you want there to be a revolution, you want her to lead it, and you want her to win. In the third book, it becomes more and more clear that Katniss is just a prop, that she has no real motivation other than keeping herself and her loved ones safe, and that war is hell. As she deteriorates psychologically she becomes more and more self-absorbed and irritable - again, totally realistic. And I loved the ending for the same reason. It turns everything over on its head. It really says something when you think back on the first book and long for the more innocent times.
I liked the first book and stopped there as well. The kids I teach tell me the third book is excellent, but a lot of them think the second one is only OK.
I thought that each book was a little less gripping than the one before it (though I took two days to read each), but I see a lot of value in it as YA fiction and even being assigned in the classroom. The first book provides lots of essay fodder about consumer culture, reality television etc, while the third book provides more essay fodder about how there are no clear heroes, nothing is black and white, and war is very, very bad. I think those are all valuable topics for people to have rolling around in their heads as they approach their late teens and early twenties.
I felt like the second half of the second book was too much of a retread of the first. I was interested while Katniss was navigating the world as a celebrity under duress, and how there seemed to be hints of a true revolution, even with sympathizers in the Capitol. But once the Games recommenced (and with very eye-rolling justification for them), I got bored.
Then in the third book, I feel like Collins bit off more than she could chew in trying to depict a revolution. She needed to either make the rebels unambiguous heroes, or devote more thought, time, and writing skill to District 13 and their interaction with Katniss. As it was actually written, it didn’t pull me in. I’ll be interested to see what the movies do with the final two books - I think this is a good opportunity for the movies to be better than the books by editing and tweaking.
As a fan of dystopia stories, I greatly enjoyed the first book. The second was okay, the last felt rushed.
Am I the only person who thought that the romance subplot was completely unnecessary? It felt as if the author said “Almost done…whoops, need something to draw in the teenage girls!” and was watching Twilight at the time and decided that the “Two guys loves one girl” angle was the way to go.
It felt very…contrived. She loves neither of them, then both, then nobody, then Peter, then Gale, etc. etc. Seems like she loves whichever guy she is currently in the presence of but is always thinking about the other. It seeemed like a cop-out that they took away the option of her choosing at the end, as Gale and continued onward with the rebellions and that left Peeta to claim her.
I read the first one and would not recommend it to anyone. It was a quick read and was acceptably violent, but those alone cannot salvage the book. The author relieves readers of having to do any thinking or interpretation for themselves. Readers are literally never in doubt what Katniss is thinking at any point during the book. These voice-overs remove all but the most superficial and uninteresting ambiguities. The novel reduces to a rather ham-handed allegory that is anything but a brilliant parable of contemporary culture. Take away the interpretive crutches and there isn’t very much left. I give YA readers more credit than this.
Then you’re giving almost everyone too much credit. Most people enjoy a good yarn when it’s provided and don’t agonize over the absence of ambiguities to interpret. (Go back to the comment on Star Wars a few posts ago for another creative work with no ‘ambiguities’ to speak of that caught the popular consciousness because it was an entertaining story.)
If you were trying to argue that, as entertaining as it was, it wasn’t very literary, then I’d be right behind you, but for what it was, it’s perfectly effective, and talking down to the folks who enjoyed it for that seems a little high handed.
Also, from my own perspective I enjoyed book 1 and the 2nd half of book three (once things started HAPPENING again, rather than “Katniss sits around and goes stir crazy”) quite a bit, and I kinda wish there had been a more elegant way to get from the end of 1 to the 2nd half of three without having to navigate all the ‘meh’ in between, but I couldn’t think of one, sadly.
No, that is not what I am trying to argue at all. I like a good action novel as much as the next guy. More, probably, if my vast collection of David Gemmell is any indication. When I want an art novel, I read one. But no one can accuse the hack and slash books I read as being allegorical, and certainly no one pretends that somehow they are brilliant social commentary. They’re not. They also usually spare me what the two-dimensional characters are thinking. I know what they are thinking; they are wish-fulfillment action heroes. I could figure this out when I was 12, and I am no great shakes. Like I said, I give people more credit than this.
So if the Hunger Games was just a dystopic action novel, then I probably would have enjoyed it a bit more. But instead it veers into thinly motivated allegory and caricature. If anything, this book should have had fewer literary pretensions. Try this exercise. Remove all of the voice-overs and see if there is enough meat for the novel to hang together. I don’t think there is. Just about nothing holds up under a little more scrutiny. It was an unsatisfying read.
I’ve only read the first book, and it was a super-cool premise and an exciting story, but I felt it foundered between wanting to be a young-adult novel, focused on what a teenage girl thinks and feels, and wanting to be an action novel drenched in gore.
The experience in the arena was so savage that no one could have survived it with anything close to normal human emotions. It was military combat with a 96% fatality rate, inflicted on children with minimal preparation and training, with no comrades in arms or belief in a cause to soften the experience.
The winner would have been overwhelmed with survivor guilt and PTSD. It didn’t quite work, for me, as a “teenage girl torn between two boys” set-up.
But like I say, it was a cool update (reality TV) on old premises (gladiators forced to fight for entertainment, random death, children behaving savagely, all-controlling and oppressive government), and I enjoyed it as such.
Perhaps because my teenage years are far behind me, I didn’t interpret the first novel as having a romance in it. I read it as Katniss having molded herself into an ultimately practical survival machine long before the games, and her trying to cope with someone with normal human emotions being in love with her. It seemed pretty clear to me from repeated references to her learning to wear a mask, her not wanting to marry and have children and subject them to the Capitol’s rule, and so on. The only person she cared about was Prim.
I just finished the series. All in all, I’m underwhelmed, and I found #2 and #3 weak. My complaints:
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plot arcs repetitive. Every chapter ends with a cliff hanger of epic proportions, the last sentence always reveals some major development. The next chapter then reveals how Katniss reacts to those developments, and then as things are starting to sort of normalize and the narrative just sort of moving on for a few pages, you realize that the chapter must be drawing to and end and that a new cliff hanger must be coming soon.
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I found Katniss becoming annoying as fuck after a while. I realize she’s a teenager but after a while I found her complaining and bitching and moaning to become very obnoxious. I guess the plotline of a teenager objecting to having virtually all aspects of her life being controlled by adults might be something that resonates with the intended audience, but I ended up getting tired of her sense of entitlement. For instance,
In ch. 1 of bk. 3 (I think) she visits District 12 which has been bombed to the ground and evacuated - one of her ‘demands’ for working with the rebels. WFT?
- I don’t find Panem convincing as a post-apocalyptic world. Politically, the entire system, with the hunger games, the districts v the capital, pres. Snow, etc., just does not seem believable to me.
I didn’t notice this thread when I started this one: Cast the Next Two Movies. Please drop in if you have thoughts on Finnick Odair especially.