Yes, I am confused. Everywhere I go kids are reading it. I read a few reviews online and their gushing nature made me decide not to go near it. And then I found out that many teachers are using it in their classes... so I decided I wanted to know what all the fuss was about.
I have read the first book in the series and I'm confused.
With all the hype around the book and the way it's being shoved in their faces wherever they go I'm not surprised that kids are into it - regardless of the subject matter. What I am surprised about it how so many adults are reading it and not having serious issues about giving it to their students and even their children.
The short (spoiler-free) review is that it's a terribly written, gory, violent book with characters that show no moral/ethical dimension even when they are being faced with committing horrific crimes. I've read several reviews where people claim that it provides a criticism of certain social phenomena. What I saw is that it has the opportunity to do this, but never does.
Moving on...
World-Building: *headdesk*
Characterization: shallow...terrible use of the POV
Plot: disturbing and predictable
Writing Style: terrible and lazy
I will explain it in detail below, but there will be SPOILERS. You have been warned.
As I began to read The Hunger Games the bad writing made me feel like banging my head on something, but I forced myself to keep going. What unfolded was disturbing, badly characterized and predictable.
The main character, Katniss, is a teenage girl who is solely responsible for keeping her family alive, which she does by hunting illegally in the woods near her home. She's living in District 12 of a country, Panem, that rose out of the ashes of a post-apocalyptic North America. The "Capitol" is very oppressive to the district and is the sole reason that they are all on the brink of starvation. At least, this is what we're told through Katniss' unnatural thoughts.
She's living under oppression and is forced to partake in the most disgusting aspect of this situation: the Hunger Games, where children from each province are forced to battle to the death before the cameras. Yet, throughout the book we never get to see the natural emotions that she should be feeling as a result of this situation. We don't get to see her anger, her pain or any hint of rebellion. The most we get is statements like "it's unfair". And the novel is written in the first person perspective.
Moving past the lack of emotion... there are detailed descriptions of every single article of clothing that Katniss wears and every meal she has ever eaten, but when she's in the middle of a crucial event the story, which is written from inside her head, suddenly cuts to long-winded descriptions of the background and the Capitol's rules and so on. When people are in the middle of crucial, life or death, situations they don't sit there pondering the history of their country and so on and so forth.
This is one of the reasons why I wanted to *headdesk* for the world-building... it was all done in the wrong way, at the wrong time, with minimal showing and way too much misplaced telling. This is, however, not all. There were many other problems with the world-building. One of the most prominent issues is that the world-building is used as a tool to smooth the plot and provide convenient work-arounds when the character is stuck. When she's stuck up in a tree with no way to escape from the pack of Career Tributes bent on killing her there's suddenly a nest of those weird mutant wasps that she can throw at them just hanging above her head, even though these wasps were never mentioned anywhere in the story before this point.
When she needs a way to communicate with Rue suddenly the Mockingjays are conveniently all over the place even though she never noticed, or mentioned them before. Apparently, these Mockingjays are crucial in the history of Panem and have a huge role in the rebellion, but we only see them when they can act as a convenient tool for the two girls.
I'm not even going to mention the ridiculous parachutes. Or the high-tech stuff that's apparently all over the Capitol, but never mentioned before Katniss encounters it. Or the absence of cameras even though this is a televised reality show, but these weird mutant creatures really got on my nerves.
If the Capitol really had the possibility to genetically engineer monsters so horrifying as killer wolves with the eyes (and possibly brains!) of the dead tributes or the killer wasps then you'd think that Katniss and the rest of the population would be living in such fear of them that she would have thought about or mentioned them before they showed up in the arena. Or, I dunno, encountered them in the woods on her illegal hunting trips.
It will be clear by now that the author continuously tells instead of showing, but I want to reiterate it again. There are multiple opportunities for her to use her short, clipped sentences to great effect in the action sequences, but she consistently avoids them. An example that stuck out for me was when Katniss is suffering from the hallucinatory effects of the mutant wasps. Instead of describing the horrors that she sees, such as Prim dying before her eyes and the repeated death of her father, all we get is two sentences where she says that she saw these things before waking up.
The most disturbing aspect of the story is that no one tries to rebel against the idea of 24 children fighting to the death. The children themselves take it for granted and they all kill, including Katniss, who is preoccupied with staying alive. Her "heroic protest" at the end is to decide that they should both commit suicide. Supposedly because they love each other and can't bear to kill each other, but we know that Katniss was only pretending, and she didn't have any problem with participating in the games before this point.
My question is: why couldn't they have all rebelled and banded together, helping each other survive in the arena without killing each other and forcing the game-makers to kill them off ruthlessly in front of the whole nation or let them go? Why did no one think of this in the many years that the games were on?
My other problem with the ethics in this story is the way Katniss goes along with the "lovestruck" pretense, kissing Peeta several times in the story and playing with his affections and at the end - after all they've been through together - she suddenly feels nothing for him and lets him know that it was all for the cameras. Not only is this unrealistic - it makes sense for her to have actually formed some attachment to him after all this! - it's also saying to the ten-year-olds reading this that that kind of behavior is ok, and that the kind of intimacy they shared can be meaningless and without consequence. Not only this, but apparently going naked in front of her prep team causes absolutely no self-consciousness on her part. If the author thinks this is possible then I don't think she's met many teenagers lately.
I could go on forever, but I won't bore you any more. In short, please think again - and again - before giving this book to children. For me, it had no redeeming qualities and in my opinion the only thing it's good for is to show people what not to do when writing fiction...>.>
Feel free to leave a comment if you agree or disagree with any of the points I've made!
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