BOOK REVIEW: The Hunger Games

The Hunger Games. A soppy teen novel about a plain girl in a love triangle with two other ‘tortured’ souls. Heard that one before? Yeah, that’s Twilight. The comparisons between The Hunger Games and Twilight have been coming in their droves, but here’s the problem: they’re nothing alike.

The writing style and addictive nature of their plotlines are the only similarities between the two. Twilight captivated me when I was 14, and at the ripe old age of 20, I refused to put The Hunger Games down until page by page I found out what happened to Katniss, Peeta and Gale.

That’s our love triangle, possibly the only other similarity between this and the Twilight trilogy, except Peeta (who does have one of the most ridiculous names of the book, I cannot help but pronounce it as I imagine E.T would) is not a wimpy vampire and Gale isn’t an always half naked werewolf. And whilst we’re at it, Katniss isn’t a wimpy, plain teenage girl; she’s got balls (the metaphorical kind of course). Whereas Bella has the self-conscious meekness you would associate with a teenage girl, Katniss Everdeen is the teenage girl that teenage girls want to be. She can be stroppy and stubborn, but she’s a self-thinking, confident young woman, and that is something that the author Suzanne Collins has to be credited for; giving the 21st century teenage girl a literary hero with confidence.

However, The Hunger Games isn’t a piece of literary genius, it has got a simple structure and the plot events unfold almost immediately after each other, creating the addictive nature of the story. It is a story set in a futuristic dystopian North America, now called Panem, which is sectioned into 12 Districts, each district well known for what it produces. The first districts are the most profitable and prosperous, descending in value to District 12, used for mining coal where most of its inhabitants perish from starvation. And it is in District 12 that we find Katniss Everdeen, a skilled hunter, providing her family with food and stability, providing a very mature narrative to follow.

And so we are introduced to the Games, run by the Capitol, the centre of the country containing the most wealthy and powerful figures, who hold the Hunger Games, a tournament which selects two young people from each district to battle to the death against their 23 other opponents. And it’s that simple; they’re competing to live, but it’s televised to the entire country, the wealthy inhabitants of the Capitol and the game masters controlling the events of the games and taking bets on who will survive.
 

The content of the novel is gripping stuff, especially for its target young adult audience. It's attractive to both the male and female teenage reader. It is not just a soppy teenage novel about a meaningless love triangle; it’s brutal in its content but this only increases the reader’s determination that Katniss survives. With the following sequels Catching Fire and Mockingjay to look forward to in addition to its new highly anticipated film adaptation The Hunger Games is on a high right now, and it’s well deserved.

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