The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

The Hunger Games has the complete package, likeable characters and a well written, engaging plot… with the movie due out in 23 March for Australia, read it before everyone else has!

Dystopian, yet realistic, the novel is written for the youth market, but also holds plenty of appeal for adult readers as well.

Suzanne Collins makes you believe in another world, an eerily familiar world which parallels our own in many ways.

The heroine of the story is Katniss Everdeen, a sixteen-year-old girl who volunteers for The Hunger Games tournament when her twelve-year-old sister Prim is drawn in the ballot.

Katniss is a survivor, she has spent many years providing for her family after the death of her father in a mining accident. She knows how to hunt, set a snare and shoot a bow and arrow, so her odds of survival are in her favor.

Through Katniss’ eyes we see the country of Panem, its major city ‘Capitol’ and the injustice she sees in the situation she is thrust into.

In the edition I read there was a short interview with Collins which talked about her inspiration for the novel. In it she said, “...on one channel there’s a group of people competing for, I don’t know, money maybe? And on the next there’s people fighting an actual war.”

This book will make you think twice about what society sees as ‘entertaining’….

Find The Hunger Games in the Youth and Adult Fiction section of the library.
Read The Hunger Games? Continue the series with Catching Fire and Mockingjay.