Welcome to the Seventy-Fifth Hunger Games!
The Hunger Games Trilogy
written by Suzanne Collins
Welcome to my seventy-fifth review! I've come a long way, and I thought I would celebrate this special occasion with sharing one of my favorite books in a throwback Thursday kind of way. By the time I found the hunger games I was fed up with reading books about paranormal and hormonal high school students. Every book was the same plot and after squelching my way through the swampy pages of yet another bummer I was raised from the perdition by Suzzane Collins. She provided a book for young adult readers that wasn't about some sappy girl falling for an unavailable "bad-boy". She instead wrote about Katniss Everdeen, a strong heroine for girls to look up to.
Katniss is the provider and protector for her family living in a society that is impoverished and corrupted. Often she considers leaving her home in district twelve to go live in the wilderness out of reach of the capitol and especially their Hunger Games. Every year one boy and one girl is selected randomly from each of the twelve districts to compete in the Hunger Games. These twenty-four competitors are summoned to the capitol to fight to the death in an arena that can be any environment from the desert to a poisonous forest. The last one standing wins fame, fortune, and food for their district.
These games are twisted and ugly for many reasons; 1) all participants are from the ages of twelve to eighteen, 2) They have to slaughter each other like animals, 3) and worst of all this is done on live television. Parents must watch their precious children beat each other to death with rocks and other weapons while they sit impotently hundreds of miles away while the people of the capitol get a kick out of it. For the capitol the Hunger Games are a power play over the districts in response to them rebelling seventy-four years ago, and every year they are remind them of the power they have over them. We will see who has the power by book three, but for now it is time for the Seventy-Fourth Hunger Games!
When Katniss' younger sister Primrose Everdeen is selected to be a tribute, Katniss is forced to volunteer on reflex. Now she will be forced to do "do whatever it takes to win" and get back home, but she will have fight with everything she has. She will have to kill, she will have to lie through her teeth, but most of all she has to give the capitol a show. The first book in the Hunger Games Trilogy is all about Katniss' fight to survive the games, but in doing so the wheels begin turning on something bigger than this game. In the following books sparks of rebellion flicker and ignite as the world watches Katniss Everdeen "the girl on fire!"
This book is amazing in so many ways, but sometimes while reading these books I felt a bit like a psychopath. Reading about all of the descriptive and gory deaths that befell each child; tracker jackers, flames, spears, the rain of blood, tidal waves, poisonous gas, guts, monstrous dogs, and so much more. I was as entertained as those blasted capitol people! Look what reality TV has become for them. One second we are watching our favorite celeb getting her nails done next thing you know we will be watching children slaughtering each other. I worry about my generation sometimes, but hopefully the Hunger Games will prove as warning enough to keep it in the pages.
One of the things that make this book special to me is that I can never look up to those pitiful, weak-willed girls I kept reading about. They didn't have a backbone or a voice, but Katniss has both. She fights to do what is right and stay alive while becoming a symbol for an entire nation through her morality, actions, and words. She is someone a whole generation of new readers can look up to.
