By Susan Collins

When The Hunger Games first came out, I avoided it like the plague because I knew the premise: children forced to fight to the death. Yeah, I wasn’t going to go into that knowing that most people I would meet would be dead by the end. So, I avoided the whole trilogy. Even when a relative gave me the book set as a Christmas present, I avoided it. Right up until the point where I couldn’t anymore. In my second year of university, I took a class called American Science Fiction, and The Hunger Games was on the required reading list. The odds were not in my favor. So, of course, I read it, and then I read the rest of the trilogy. I loved the world-building and how painful the world is.

Before I proceed, here is the back-of-the-book description and my spoiler-free review.

“Winning will make you famous. Losing means certain death.

In a dark vision of the near future, twelve boys and twelve girls are forced to appear in a live TV show called the Hunger Games. There is only one rule: kill or be killed.

When sixteen – year -old Katniss Everdeen steps forward to take her sisters place in the games, she sees it as a death sentence.

But Katniss has been close to death before. For her, survival is second nature.”

Here is my spoiler-free review, just looking at the information from the back of the book.

I loved how Susan Collins created a world that feels like it could happen in our world, both looking at a totalitarian country, where we see the few having everything that they might need when the rest starve. But also, with the way that The Hunger Games is a show. You can see that Susan Collins has, in the past, worked within the world of reality shows.

The characters feel real, the losses will hurt. If you let it, this book will consume you in the way all good books do. You will spend a long time worrying how they will make it out. But I will not tell you more, you’ll need to read it for that. And if you are like me and enjoy reading along to a podcast, I can recommend “UNspoiled! The Hunger Games”.

And now, for the people who have read the book, I have three thoughts. Firstly, the line that is everywhere is “may the odds be ever in your favor.” Which is a load of Capital crap. For one thing, the fact that Prim only has her name in the bowl one time, and she still gets picked, feels completely improbable. I have a personal theory that the game is rigged. After all, the game would be “less fun” if there wasn’t at least one 12-year-old in the game.

However, the main reason for the idea of the odds is tesserae. Basically, the idea is that after a child becomes eligible for the games, you can sign up for tesserae and exchange their name in the pool for every member of your family in exchange for an amount of fat and grain.

This feels like welfare but evil. “If you want food to live, you need to risk your life.” This feels like something you may get if the wrong politician gets into power. Another thing that it reminds me of is how, in America, many people will sign up for the army to pay for university. This means that people in this day in age, where teenagers are agreeing to enter a kill-or-be-killed situation that could very easily leave you with mental or physical scars for the chance of a better life that a university degree advertises. The only difference is 1 the military is a certainty but tesserae is a gamble and 2 you can start applying for tesserae at twelve but you need to be seventeen to sign up for the army.

The other thing on my mind is the romance of Katniss and Peta. In The Hunger Games, you need sponsors to send you stuff that you will need to survive. After Peta confesses that he loves Katniss, they need to play into it. Especially after the rules change and they might live. Katniss, especially in her mind, is acting in love just because of The Games. She plays it up so the Capital will want them to last because of the story. You can see that Susan Collins has worked with reality TV, and therefore, that romance increases the drama. The main thing that sticks out is the fact that Katniss’s first kiss is with someone whom she does not love. Sure, she has feelings, but it is because she owes him.

Katniss is an interesting character because she has grown up to keep her family alive. But with anything to do with romance, she is still a child. Due to the fact that it was something she couldn’t allow herself to feel. If she married and had kids, she risked losing them to The Games. Seeing her work her way through that is an underlying fascination in these books.

If this has sparked your interest, then, you need to pick up a copy wherever it is convenient for you. And until next time.

 Happy reading to all and to all a good night