Hunger Games

I finally got around to reading the much-hyped 1st installment of Suzanne Collins' trilogy about a dystopian future where children are sacrificed in televised games of survival for the entertainment of the refined citizens of the capital city--oh and to serve as a reminder to the Districts never ever to rebel again. I've been reading about this for years in the YA chats and you can't avoid hearing about the new movie based on this book, but I just hadn't put it at the top of the list until my pal Dale Pehrsson sent the book along to me. It was actually an enjoyable break from the string of depressing (human trafficking, bullying) and just ho-hum YA books I have been reviewing of late. The characters are compelling, the plot moves along at a good pace and it seems altogether too possible. I see the movie has already been released to DVD so will move it up the list in my Netflix queue. I will definitely read the sequels--once I work my way through a big stack of review books and books my friends have loaned me. I thought I would be plowing through books at a much faster pace in retirement, but have been too busy with outdoor activities. Maybe when winter comes.

Anyway, for those of you who have not read or heard about this, Katniss is 16 when the story opens and has been  supporting her mom and younger sister with the results of her illegal hunting since her dad died when she was eleven. In the twelve districts which now represent the former United States. people are pretty uniformly poor--certainly in Katniss' home of District 12 which supplies coal to the capital city. Katniss' father taught her to use a bow and arrow and this skill will help her survive the Hunger Games, a nationally televised competition to the death. Each district must send one girl and one boy to the competition each year as a "tribute" to pay for an earlier failed rebellion. Katniss volunteers to take her sister Prim's place when Prim's name is drawn in the lottery. She is joined by Peeta, the baker's son, to whom she owes her survival right after her father died. And yet she does not know whether to trust him--after all, only one of them will come out of this alive--and she certainly is taken aback when he claims in the televised interviews with the game contestants that he has loved her since he was 5 years old. This is right up there with the best of YA fantasy.