Hunger Games

I have now finished all 3 books. My over-the-top excitement after reading the first book was largely sustained through all three. Two points stick out, one good and one bad.

(1) The Good.

Point of view. The author wrote this from a first person point of view, and a very limited teenage girl point of view at that. This was brilliant. I'd go so far as to say that this is the reason the books succeeded. Writing this in 3rd person would have been so drastically different a story ... and all of the ugliness of the world would have been very, very hard to digest. It is only through the lens of Katniss that the reader can absorb this story without running away in horror. Katniss's own flat emotional state is critical to our ability to enter into this world.

When Sam described the world to us, we as parents were shocked that a 5th grader was reading something like this. After reading the first book myself, my fears were allayed; the author, after all, used to write for the "Little Bear" tv series, so she must be good. The gore and awfulness of the world is blunted because Katniss only sees some of it, and her own emotional hardness protects the reader to some degree.

(2) The Bad

That said, part of the story, maybe the most important part, is Katniss's journey from being emotionally dead to coming back to life. It is a loooooooong journey. One never fully completed, I would argue, but at least by the very end of the third book she's made progress, and looks to be able to make more.

Without spoiling anything, I will simply say that her "vote" near the end of book 3 struck me as completely and totally wrong and out of her character. Maybe, *maybe*, she was faking it in order to bolster her secret plan, but if so, the author kind of dropped the ball by not indicating this to us somehow. Heaven knows we got inside of Katniss's head for just about everything else, so why not this?

I'll probably have more to say, but there's a start. Still a highly recommended read, almost impossible to put down. If done well, the movies will be HUGE. (I'm still not entirely sure this was appropriate for 5th grade reading, but, well, there are worse ways to learn about how nasty people can be I suppose.)