The Hunger Games

Synopsis
Katniss Everdeen takes her younger sister's place in a tournament in which 24 teenagers fight to the death.

My thoughts

C.J. Cregg: "They sent me two turkeys. The more photo-friendly of the two gets a presidential pardon and a full life at a children's zoo. The runner-up gets eaten."

President Bartlett: "If the Oscars were like that, I'd watch." 

It's a funny throw-away line in one of my favorite episodes of The West Wing. But if you stop to think about it, would you watch? Especially if they were children, would you watch?

The answer is no. The premise of the book - that teenagers are chosen in an annual lottery to enter a tournament in which they will fight until only one is left alive - is so horrifying that viewing the Hunger Games is compulsory in Suzanne Collins's fictional dystopia. It's a brilliant fusion of the ancient Greek myth of Theseus with our present-day obsession with reality television. My husband commented that he didn't know what appalled him most - that he read a book about kids killing kids or that he enjoyed it. "Why did it have to be kids?" he asked. "Why couldn't they have filled the arena with people everybody hates already, like lawyers?"

Since the heart-wrenching tragedy in Newtown, violence in pop culture has been getting a lot of attention - and deservedly so. And yet I'd still strongly recommend this book, despite the fact that it is unquestionably, disturbingly, graphically violent. Other books may have higher body counts, but The Hunger Games is especially unnerving because many of the deaths are described in intimate detail. It's not like a movie or a video game where someone gets shot and falls out of the frame.

But let's face it - violence has been glorified ever since humans developed the vocabulary to do so. Homer lovingly described battle deaths in minute detail. (One passage in the Iliad vividly traces the trajectory of a spear smashing through a guy's skull, continuing on through the roof of his mouth, cutting off his tongue, and breaking his jaw. Reading it made me imagine it happening in slow motion.) Fighting and dying in battle were romanticized and idealized well into the twentieth century.

The Hunger Games also has a conscience. Katniss (who, by the way, is the ultimate heroine - smart, resourceful, and utterly badass) never kills unnecessarily. There's also a lot of introspection and reflection on what defines a person's character.

Oh - and there's a sweet PG-rated love triangle (albeit a very lopsided one). Katniss can't quite sort out how she feels about her hunting buddy Gale. And she's thrown into the arena with Peeta, a boy who showed her a small bit of kindness at a desperate time in her childhood. But since Gale disappears from the book after just a few chapters, my full allegiance went to Peeta.

One of my only complaints was the shoddy copyediting. They couldn't decide whether Katniss was from District 12 or District Twelve. It's a small thing, but it drove me nuts.

Bottom line
A compulsive read.

Fine print
The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins
Genre: YA fiction
Photo from Goodreads
I bought this book.