Awesome. Stinkin' fantastic. Amazing. Wonderful.
No wonder it's a New York Times Best Seller, USA Today Best Seller, ALA Top Ten Book for Young Adult Literature, and so on. It's a long list. Why? Because it's awesome. stinking fantastic. amazing. and wonderful.
Someone recommend this book to me a few weeks ago and I kind of pushed it off. That didn't last long because from then on this book was everywhere. I was working on summer reading lists and it was on many I looked at. It was recommended by friends and friends of friends. It wouldn't go away, so I made a trip to Barnes and Noble and bought it. Even though I knew I wouldn't like it because it's not "my type" of book. Whatever that may be.
So here's the summary as told by Lev Grossman in "
Catching Fire: Suzanne Collins' Hit Young-Adult Novels" which appeared in TIME.
"The Hunger Games is set in an unspecified future time when things have gone pretty spectacularly badly for humanity. The world, or the bit of it we can see, is dominated by a ruling caste who live in luxury in a city called the Capitol. The rest of us live like peasants in 12 districts that are strictly cordoned off from the Capitol and one another. Life in the districts sucks: it's mostly hard labor--mining coal and farming and working in factories--in dismal conditions.
To make things even dismaler, once a year each district is required to give up two of its children, chosen by lottery, and enter them in the Hunger Games. The kids are dropped into an enormous arena strewn with traps and hazards, with a heap of weapons and supplies in the middle. The last child alive wins a lifetime of luxury and celebrity. The action is filmed and broadcast to the entire world.
We experience this ordeal through the eyes of Katniss, a resident of District 12, a harsh, cold region mostly given over to coal-mining. She is a passionate 16-year-old who hates the Capitol and is devoted to her family; she volunteers for the Games to take the place of her sister, whose name came up in the lottery. Katniss is a skilled hunter and sheer death with a bow and arrow. She doesn't like to kill. But she doesn't want to die either.
Whereas Katniss kills with finesse, Collins writes with raw power. After a life spent in freezing poverty, Katniss experiences pleasure--warmth, food, pretty clothes--with almost unbearable intensity, and that's where Collins' writing comes alive. (Not sex, though. The Hunger Games isn't just chaste, like Twilight; it's oddly non-erotic.) Likewise, Collins brings a cold, furious clarity to her accounts of physical violence. You might not think it would be possible, or desirable, for a young-adult writer to describe, slowly and in full focus, a teenage girl getting stung to death by a swarm of mutant hornets. It wasn't, until Collins did it. But rather than being repellent, the violence is strangely hypnotic. It's fairy-tale violence, Brothers Grimm violence--not a cheap thrill but a symbol of something deeper. (One of the paradoxes of the book is that it condemns the action in the arena while also inviting us to enjoy it, sting by sting. Despite ourselves, we do.)"
Read more:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1919156,00.html#ixzz1P5maqbJx
