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The Hunger Games trilogy
by Suzanne Collins
Luckily, my best friend Debra insisted I read them so that she could have someone to discuss them with. Really, my contrary-to-society reading tendencies were far overshadowed by the fact that just on principle, I should love the books: they're futuristic more-or-less utopian (dystopian, more correctly), a genre that I love.
I started reading on a Friday evening... and kept reading until Saturday morning. I literally could not put these books down (and even though the story was over for me as a reader halfway through the third, I still had. to. finish.) I finished the first, The Hunger Games, at 2 am... and went straight into reading Catching Fire. When I finished at around 6 am, I was really ready to start the finale, Mockingjay, but I realized that I should probably get a bit of sleep so as to be at least moderately functional the next day. Three hours of sleep and five hours of reading later, I was done with the whole trilogy, less than 24 hours after I started.
{if you have never read the series}
You should read it. But be prepared to be a little disappointed when you're finished. The ending isn't uplifting; it's a story of, ultimately, war and war's toll on life, both for the society and for individuals. In the process, it's a tale of love, media, entertainment, and trust.
{if the very idea of children fighting to the death or reading about violent deaths bothers you}
Don't read this book. My mother, an elementary school librarian, hated the book for those reasons, and finished The Hunger Games only "to get those people out of danger." My sister, an elementary school teacher, couldn't palate the concept and has abandoned the book twice in mid-read. It's okay to not want to read this book for those reasons. I, personally, don't create vivid images in my mind reading, so the violent deaths don't bother me like they do those with more vivid imaginations.
{if you have read the books and/or are prepared for the below spoilers}
Keep reading. :)
My one-word review on finishing the series: dissatisfied. I was completely dissatisfied with the ending, as I know many other readers were. I don't feel like Collins copped out or was just looking for a quick ending. I think she did exactly what every good author should do: tell the story she set out to tell, the story she envisioned from the beginning. She herself has even said that the ending of the trilogy never changed even as she was writing the series. She has also said that the novels were inspired by modern media: "On one channel young people were competing for money. On the next channel, young people were fighting for their lives."
And, at its heart, The Hunger Games trilogy is about war. What other phenomenon can take these two people who were so vivid and who lived, breathed, and loved -- and turn them into only shells of their former beings, still alive but empty and hollow and broken beyond repair?
It was at the point that you realize that Peeta, the symbol of everything that is good in the world, of unconditional love, is broken beyond repair that the book was over for me. The moment they rescued him, when he first sees Katniss and tries to kill her -- game over. Peeta was the goodness that kept me reading though this terrible and cruel world. Once his goodness and love were gone, corrupted by the Capitol, I cut myself off from the book. I finished, but just do be done. The frenzied-excited what will happen next feeling was gone because I knew that once broken, he could never be fully restored.
As a the final in a series about war, Mockingjay has an entirely different feeling than The Hunger Games and Catching Fire. In the first two books, Katniss is lucid and motivated by love. Love for Prim and her mother. Love for Gale. Maybe even love for Peeta. She is thinking clearly about surviving, about doing what is best for Prim.
By the time she has survived the events that turn her in to the mockingjay of the rebellion, Katniss is confused and psychotic. She becomes incoherent, drugged for the duration, and all of her actions in Mockingjay seem to motivated by fear and survival, with only the smallest shred of the love that was so motivating throughout The Hunger Games and Catching Fire.
Ultimately, yes, Katniss ends up with Peeta, like we all wanted. (I, for one, cannot blame her for not being able to look Gale in the face after Prim's death.) But even then, she chooses him sheerly out of survival. Convenience, almost. Their children come about because Peeta wants them, not because Katniss has found love enough for children.
I would have been satisfied (not overly happy but satisfied) if the series had ended with even a twinge of hope, of a feeling that everything that Katniss and Peeta and all the people of Panem have been through has been worth it even just a tiny bit. Instead, I still feel despondency in Katniss' musings as she watches her children. Yes, her son and daughter are safe from the Games, but she still wonders how to teach her children about past inhumanities. In her thoughts, I read no hope, no feeling of a better future. So, I finish the series unsatisfied.
Even unsatisfied, any reader who has just finished a good book should be motivated to do something, anything, differently than before. The three books of The Hunger Games trilogy are indeed good (yet unsatisfying) books, so what did I do? I hugged my husband and my son and told them I love them. I hug them a little tighter now, snuggle a little closer, grateful to have them, to have the ability to love, and to live in a world where love is possible. And now, to quench the unsatisfaction that is still gnawing at me, almost a week later, I'm off to watch a more satisfying love story: Anne of Green Gables (only the first two, though... the third one is terribly unsatisfying ;)
Information and interviews you might be interested in:
- The official Hunger Games website
- Scholastic Media Room (scroll down for a list of everything ever published about The Hunger Games trilogy)
- School Library Journal
- NPR
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