I had heard lots of gushing over The Hunger Games by various people. Mostly over here on LJ, I must confess. So I thought that now that I have a library card I might as well find the book and see if it's all that. They didn't have it in Enfield. (Do they have anything in Enfield?) But I could order it to be brought over from another library, which I did. And it came a couple of days before I was to fly to Athens.
I started reading the book as soon as I boarded the tube to Heathrow at 5.15 in the morning and finished it ten minutes before we landed in Athens airport. Yup, it was gripping. But also I am a bit of a compulsive reader and usually read a book right through.
SPOILERS AHOY!!!!
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First thing I feel I must say, is that with an ominous title like Hunger Games, I would have never picked up the book if I hadn't heard so many people gush about how great it is. There is a reason I have never seen Battle Royal or read The Lord of the Flies a second time. Stories about children killing each other really turn me off.
I begun reading the book with the crazy hope that despite the title and all the foreshadowing in the first chapter, the book would end up NOT being about what I was afraid it would be. When I was disappointed, I almost put the book down. I really, really do NOT like reading about children killing each other, or being killed.
But I am a sucker for alternative realities and post-apocalyptic dystopian worlds. And I thoroughly enjoyed that part of the book. A couple of chapters in, I begun routing for the story to turn into the beginning of a revolution. I really could have got behind that... But damn it, I was reading a teenager's book - it was kind of obvious - and not an adult one. Does YA fiction deal with revolutions, I wonder...
Katniss is a very good heroine for a YA book. (Kudos for having a female heroine in an adventure story.) A little bit of an annoying bit of a heroine for an adult to read about though. She was far too strong and abrasive and certain and self-centered for me to be able to identify with her and properly like her. On the other hand, that is kind of how sixteen year olds are. I'm just too old and can no longer easily identify with teenagers.
I really liked what little we saw of Gale. And I certainly liked Peeta, there seemed to be more dimensions to his character than there were to Katniss's. Why, I wonder? Sometimes the hero/ heroine does end up a bit more simplistic and two-dimensional than the secondary characters. This is not the first time I've noticed this in a book. On the other hand, the fact Peeta was more complex as a character, made him perhaps a little less persuasive as a teenager? I'm definitely over-thinking this!
The actual Games, were gripping - even though at some point I did get a little bored, that sort of action bores me a bit. I kept on hoping something would happen, and they wouldn't actually go through with the games. Seriously, every time another kid died it annoyed the hell out of me. I especially was annoyed by the way we were supposed to be routing for the death of certain characters. *Sigh* I will not stop harping on about how a nice little revolution would have improved the book vastly.
I called almost all of the plot twists - I have been reading books / watching films too long to be surprised by such basic plot twists. The only one that really took me by surprise - so much that I really don't know what to make of it - were the zombie-werewolfs. I'm not sure if it was brilliantly nightmarish, or just a bit too much over-the-top. The plot "twist" I emphatically didn't like was the open-ended possible love triangle. Bleurgh! Have a mentioned how much love triangles bore me?
Anyway. It was a good and interesting book, and at some point I did tear up. And I was left curious enough to seriously consider trying to order the second book from my library when I get back.
So, who else has read the book? Anyone want to talk about it? It did give me a number of vague thinky thoughts.
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