The Hunger Games
Author: Suzanne Collins
Genre: Young Adult Science Fiction
My Rating: 4/5
One of my latest literary discoveries was an intriguing specimen of young adult fiction called The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. For some reason, this book kept popping up on my radar, and each time it did so it further aroused my interest. Though I am a big fan of the classics, at times I enjoy good young adult fiction, and of course it's helpful to have books to recommend to students. I learned this well while student teaching in a seventh grade English class. Students were required to have an SSR book of their own choice with them almost everyday, and when a student came to class sans said book with the excuse that "there just aren't any good books at the library" or "I don't like reading," the best retaliation was to have a book to recommend.
Looking back, I now wish I had known before about Collins' brilliant book, because I know that many of my seventh graders would have loved it. And yet, it proves itself good literature in that it may be enjoyed by adults as well as teens: The Hunger Games is fast-paced, creative, and piercingly relevant to the world today.
The book takes place in Panem, a nation established many years in the future on the ruins of what is now the United States. While the nation's shining Capitol houses all kinds of wealth and luxury, including the latest advancements in technology, the surrounding twelve districts more resemble medieval villages, where families barter for food and clothing in the town square and the especially bold, like Katniss, illegally hunt game and gather roots and berries in the nearby forest to help their loved ones survive. As if simply surviving weren't enough to worry about, the twelve districts live in fear of the annual Reaping, in which two tributes from each district, a girl and a boy, are chosen randomly to be entered in the Hunger Games, an honor from which only one tribute is allowed to emerge alive. When Katniss' younger sister, twelve-year-old Primrose, is selected to participate in these deadly games, Katniss immediately volunteers to take her place. This decision soon finds her alone in an unfamiliar wilderness where she must literally outwit, outplay, and outlast her fellow twenty-three tributes while all of Panem watches and picks apart her every action on live television.
Collins takes the ancient Roman gladiator games and combines them with the modern popular Survivor television series and places this concept into a future reminiscent of Bradbury's Farenheit 451. The result is a society piercingly similar to our own. The possibilities for classroom discussion and critical thinking here are abundant.
I greatly enjoyed reading this book, and highly recommend it to young adults and old.
