Book Review: 'The Hunger Games' by Suzanne Collins

Love triumphs over everything, even in the midst of the battle for survival. Peeta and Katniss learn this early on in The Hunger Games, though for Peeta it’s true love.
For anyone who has not read or heard of Suzanne Collins’ trilogy, if you were 16 and your younger sister had just been chosen to represent your district in a fight to the death with a 1/24 chance for coming out alive, what would you do? For Katniss Everdeen, it means taking a leaf from Mulan’s book. She goes forth, accepting her fate and ends up one very lucky girl. Well, lucky in the sense that she’s still functioning. The Capitol isn’t so happy with her, but that’s the kind of reaction expected for all rule breakers, isn’t it?
What Collins does really well is giving us a very adult story by revealing Katniss’ thoughts, yet staying within the young adult genre. This futuristic setting is a scary thing to imagine and something no parent is willing to think about. It is perhaps a warning of what can go wrong in society if we don’t pay attention. And she may have not done this on purpose, but she sends a powerful message about reality TV. In a way reality TV contestants are just like tributes in the Hunger Games. They are manipulated on a show for the public’s entertainment. If viewers stopped watching, the show could be cancelled. That’s the problem with the Hunger Games. As much as they want to stop watching, they can’t because that’s their baby out there.
The kids barely get to be kids. They are grown up at their young age because of the environment they live in and that’s the sad part. But the really sad part is some districts make ready-born killers out of their children to bring pride to the district if they win. Katniss can’t imagine bringing a child into this world, even if her best friend Gale can so long as he lived somewhere else in the world. There is an unspoken kind of love triangle happening that you only hope gets developed in the following parts of the trilogy. Well, there’s only one way to find out…