The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins – review

The Hunger Games is children’s author Suzanne Collins’ first foray into the gritty world of science fiction. The book is centered around the life of Katniss Everdeen in the nation of Panem, an authoritarian dystopia born out of the ashes of the former United States of America. Katniss is sixteen, and for the past five years she has acted as her family’s breadwinner through her skills as a poacher after her father was killed in a coal mine explosion. Coal production is the primary industry of the area, known as District 12, and the low value of the resource makes her district the poorest of those that serve the Capitol. Malnutrition is common and starvation the fate of many. Only the rampant corruption of the local officials makes it possible for Katniss to hunt the wild game she needs to keep her family alive.

The story opens on Reaping Day, a state imposed “holiday” where two children – one boy and one girl – from each of the twelve districts are chosen by lottery to participate in the Hunger Games. During the Hunger Games the 24 “tributes” are forced to kill each other in a massive free-for-all on national television until the lone survivor is declared the winner. Katniss is extremely nervous on this Reaping Day as, in exchange for extra food rations from the state, she has entered her name into the lottery enough times to make her five times more likely than normal to be selected for the games. To her shock and horror it is instead her 12-year-old sister Primrose whose name is picked. Knowing her little sister faces certain death in the arena, Katniss takes her place and thus enters the world of the Hunger Games.

The Hunger Games has been marketed as a young adult novel, but Collins has incorporated some very mature social, political, and emotional concepts into the story. I always appreciate it when an author assumes their audience is intelligent rather than thinking of them as children who need everything spelled out. Collins knows when to show and when to tell.

Collins also does something which I don’t know that I’ve seen seen before, which is dealing with unrequited love from the perspective of the loved rather than the lover. The lover in question is a boy named Peeta who is her male counterpart from District 12. Katniss is constantly trying to set Peeta up as a villain in her own mind, when it is fairly plain to the reader that he always does right by her. And no one who has ever been a teenage boy in love doubts that Peeta’s feelings towards Katniss are anything but genuine. Such uses of dramatic irony often are brief and inelegant, while here it is neither. It is a constant source of emotional conflict that manages to never descend into the kind of melodramatic angst that plagues so much young adult fiction. Collins is a writer who truly knows her craft.

That is just one example of the ways in which the author managed to both fulfill, and then exceed my expectations. This is a book I would recommend to just about anyone, and I am definitely looking forward to seeing where she goes with the sequel, Catching Fire.