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Still Haven’t Read The Hunger Games? Here’s Why You Should Pick Up the Trilogy Now.
It’s hard to remember a time when Katniss Everdeen, the ruthless survivor from District 12, wasn’t part of the pop culture landscape. Stubborn, grey-eyed, and perpetually on the knife edge of starving, she and her bow and arrow made their way into our hearts first through Suzanne Collins’ page-turning Hunger Games trilogy, and then through Jennifer Lawrence’s portrayal in the ongoing tetralogy of movie adaptations. If you haven’t read the books yet—figuring the movies are enough, or that, despite what your best friend, mother, dentist, boss, and auto mechanic say, the story just isn’t for you—then this is your wake-up call. Forget the hype, gift yourself the series, and jump into the story. Here’s why every reader needs to know the girl on fire:
The addictive storytelling. It’s no wonder Collins’ series kicked off a new dystopian trend: the books pretty much fuse themselves to your hands from the minute you start reading. Collins gives us a taut, incredibly well-plotted survival story, complicated by love, a cast of immensely colorful characters, and an embedded parable on reality TV taken to extremes. How does Collins pull off this stew of elements, while maintaining the page-turning force of her story? By infusing the tale and its heroine with brutal pragmatism. When one of Katniss’s paramours says goodbye to her before the Games, knowing he might never see her again, his opening line isn’t, “You know I’ll always love you.” It’s “Listen. Getting a knife should be pretty easy, but you’ve got to get your hands on a bow.”
The setup. In the future, after some undetermined apocalypse, North American civilization as Collins’ characters know it consists of a glittering central city, the Capitol, surrounded by 12 hardscrabble industrial districts that provide the Capitol with goods—but are allowed barely enough resources to stay alive. From the relatively prosperous Districts 1 and 2, which manufacture luxury items, to Katniss’s District 12 home, where coal-mining families are driven to illegal acts to stay alive, the oppressed live in isolation from each other, out of a fear they’ll band together and rise up. But the Capitol’s most effective tool against rebellion is the annual Hunger Games, instated as punishment for a past uprising. Each year, in a sinisterly named “reaping,” a male and female tribute from each district, aged 12 to 18, are selected to take part in the Games, bloody battle royales set in masterfully designed arenas and broadcast on TV until just one contestant remains alive.
The stakes. They’re both political and personal. In this imagined world, citizens live under the eye of Big Brother, but their post-technology way of life keeps them too wrapped up in simple survival to fight back. Katniss ends up in the arena only because she volunteers to take her younger sister’s place, proving in one heart-pounding scene that she has both a fighting spirit and something to fight for, even in a gray and broken-down world. Her larger struggle will come into focus later, with world-shaking implications.
The unlikely heroine. Everyone loves an antihero, from Tony Soprano to Walter White, but there’s nothing like a good antiheroine to subvert expectations and keep you hooked. Katniss doesn’t want to start a revolution, she just wants to survive. Before the Games, she dreamed of escaping her impoverished life with her best friend, Gale, and taking their chances on life in the woods…despite knowing she’d have to abandon her family to do so. She’s not perfect, she’s not noble, she’s not even nice—but she is resourceful, tenacious, and mad as hell.
The love triangle. Resistance is futile: everybody loves a good love triangle. Katniss is torn between her long-held affection for Gale, the strapping coal miner she meets for forbidden hunting trips in the woods, and Peeta, a gentle baker’s son and fellow tribute, who once saved her life and is willing to do it again in the Hunger Games arena. Love, death, retributions, twists: this trilogy has all the narrative good stuff, with no filler.
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