Thoughts about The Hunger Games

I’d been resisting reading The Hunger Games, because the last time I tried a novel with this much hype behind it, an albino monk left my suspension of disbelief hemorrhaging uncontrollably. But with the movie coming out, Lisa and I decided to break down and buy a copy. She read it first, gave it a big thumbs up, and then after two chapters I was hooked, too.

So, short verdict: It’s a great read, deserving of the praise it’s gotten, and if you’ve been on the fence about trying it you should go ahead and take the leap.

Longer verdict: SPOILER ALERT!

I love the protagonist. Tough and competent without being superwoman, and refreshingly unsentimental. Katniss just feels right, psychologically. I especially liked the way the “love story” was handled, and the fact that even at the end, rather than do the predictable thing and fall for Peeta for real, Katniss remains, believably, in emotional limbo: “Dude, I’ve been way too busy keeping us both alive to even begin to sort out how I really feel about you. By the way, we’re not safe yet.”

The pacing was spot-on. There were no wasted scenes, and the pregame chapters were genuinely engaging, rather than just something to get through before the real fun could begin. The games themselves are an excellent addition to the dystopian future blood-sport subgenre.

I do feel that Collins ducked the nastier dilemmas afforded by her premise. For all the talk about what a “dark” story The Hunger Games is, it’s notable that the people Katniss kills are all Career Tributes—trained gladiators who chose to be in the games, and who are portrayed completely unsympathetically. Meanwhile, the innocent tributes all conveniently manage to die at the hands of third parties, or in accidents, sparing Katniss the need to take matters into her own hands.

Rue in particular felt like a wasted opportunity. She’s described, basically, as a dark-skinned version of Katniss’s little sister, and when Katniss proposed an alliance with her—kidding herself that she’d be able to maintain emotional distance—I assumed that was a set-up for a really, really agonizing choice somewhere around the novel’s climax. When Rue got killed not long afterwards, I was briefly relieved—I knew she had to die, and was glad that Katniss didn’t have to do anything truly despicable to make that happen—but of course my next thought was, Wait a minute, if you aren’t willing to follow that road to the end, why start down it at all? It was at that point I began to suspect that Katniss might escape the games without murdering anyone I cared about, which is comforting but also violates the storytelling principle that the most interesting drama is hiding in the part of the forest where you don’t want to go.

I was also mildly annoyed by the use of the Magical Medical Reset Button to cure Katniss’s deafness and other wounds when she finally got back to the Capitol. Again, there’s this question—If you don’t want your protagonist to have to deal with a permanent injury, why give her one in the first place?—but beyond that, it just felt wrong for her to come out of the games with no permanent physical scars. (Though I did like the creepy line about how the Gamemakers had been thinking about “altering” her.)

My desire for a more ruthless fictional universe aside, though, I really did enjoy the read, and I’m looking forward to getting into book two this weekend.