Book: The Hunger Games and Catching Fire
I have a rule of thumb: When there is a movie based on a book out or planned, I don't read the book first. I did for a while, until I realized how often I was complaining that a certain character didn't look the way I pictured them or a favorite scene had been cut. When you like a scene in a book and it gets cut out of the movie, you feel like you've been robbed. When you like a movie and then read the book and find extra scenes, it's bonus material.
So despite receiving The Hunger Games as a gift several years ago, I've let it sit on a shelf, unread. And honestly, while I liked the first movie, it didn't inspire me to rush to my bookshelf and devour the book. It was an okay story about love and survival within a really screwed-up society. The second movie was different for me-- a much deeper look at how the power structure works, and a story about challenging and changing the society. The ending was a kick in the gut, and fascinated me. When I debated about breaking my rule and reading the books because I didn't want to wait for the third movie to find out how it ends, my sister-in-law told me that the movies are "word-for-word" for the books, with no cut-out scenes, and that it would totally be safe to read them. Still on the fence about it, I picked up the first two and read them, because I've seen those movies now and there's no rule-breaking involved.
Despite this review being mostly-positive, I feel obliged to warn you: the writing is terrible. The author uses a lot of sentence fragments. The entire story is told from Katniss's point of view, so things that the movie shows from other points of view are told as exposition dumps when someone informs Katniss about them later. If I had read the book first, without the emotional connection to the story that the movies gave me, I might have given up in irritation partway through.
But the story... oh, the story. The story is marvelous. My sister-in-law is only partially correct-- very few things are cut, but there are so many more nuances that the book reveals that don't come through in the movie. It's easier to understand why the populace puts up with the system as it stands. There's more character to the districts, changing them from caricatures into real places that could exist. I can see the social injustice, the economic gulfs, and the pure gritty survival story embedded in the larger story... but I can also see the Capitol's side better, and their sense of entitlement makes more sense. There's a feeling of history, that not everything was laid out in stone at the end of the rebellion 74-75 years prior and that some of it grew organically as (misguided?) attempts to make things "better" while keeping things "fair". The love triangle is less set-in-stone and more fluid, and Katniss is much more of a broken 16-year-old than the almost-adult that she is in the movies.
So despite receiving The Hunger Games as a gift several years ago, I've let it sit on a shelf, unread. And honestly, while I liked the first movie, it didn't inspire me to rush to my bookshelf and devour the book. It was an okay story about love and survival within a really screwed-up society. The second movie was different for me-- a much deeper look at how the power structure works, and a story about challenging and changing the society. The ending was a kick in the gut, and fascinated me. When I debated about breaking my rule and reading the books because I didn't want to wait for the third movie to find out how it ends, my sister-in-law told me that the movies are "word-for-word" for the books, with no cut-out scenes, and that it would totally be safe to read them. Still on the fence about it, I picked up the first two and read them, because I've seen those movies now and there's no rule-breaking involved.
Despite this review being mostly-positive, I feel obliged to warn you: the writing is terrible. The author uses a lot of sentence fragments. The entire story is told from Katniss's point of view, so things that the movie shows from other points of view are told as exposition dumps when someone informs Katniss about them later. If I had read the book first, without the emotional connection to the story that the movies gave me, I might have given up in irritation partway through.
But the story... oh, the story. The story is marvelous. My sister-in-law is only partially correct-- very few things are cut, but there are so many more nuances that the book reveals that don't come through in the movie. It's easier to understand why the populace puts up with the system as it stands. There's more character to the districts, changing them from caricatures into real places that could exist. I can see the social injustice, the economic gulfs, and the pure gritty survival story embedded in the larger story... but I can also see the Capitol's side better, and their sense of entitlement makes more sense. There's a feeling of history, that not everything was laid out in stone at the end of the rebellion 74-75 years prior and that some of it grew organically as (misguided?) attempts to make things "better" while keeping things "fair". The love triangle is less set-in-stone and more fluid, and Katniss is much more of a broken 16-year-old than the almost-adult that she is in the movies.