The Hunger Games
I wanted to like this series. I really, really did. But for each thing that was interesting and well-handled, there always seemed to be something else that was just sadly, awkwardly, disappointingly wrong.
May as well start with the good bits -- I loved the writing style. It was simple but very effective; the visuals were clean and clear, and I had a wonderful sense of Katniss as a character and her intense survival instinct. She actually reminded me very much of Faith from Mirror's Edge, and all that that entails. The pacing was great, and the general story held my interest well enough that I devoured all three volumes within two days.
The descriptions of the excesses of the Capitol were completely fabulous - it sounded like a huge, constant anime con. The crazy body modification in particular was quite fun to read about, although I found the descriptions of the costumes a bit underwhelming at times. On the other end of the spectrum, I also loved how alive District 12 was, even in its awfulness.
The action in the Games themselves was very well written, and the tactical accuracy was quite nice. I certainly felt all of the wounds, burns, hunger, and thirst while I was reading, and the clever traps and changes made to the arenas kept things interesting.
I did find plenty of side characters to love, as is so often the case with me. The entire District 12 prep team was very fun, and my particular favorites were Cinna and Haymitch. I would have loved to hear more about some of the other tributes, particularly the previous victors in the second book.
Now for the bad; pretty much everything else. The first book was exciting and compelling, up until maybe the last fifth. The second was less immediately compelling, although still interesting, and the third was just kind of a slow descent into awkward badness. All of the political machinations seemed really cartoony and forced, and there was just such an air of contrivance about the plot that I found it hard to take seriously past a certain point. It was as if the setting evolved to fit the romantic elements, which is something that I, as a writer, completely despise and constantly agonize about how best to avoid -- plot points should be rocks anchored deep in the soil of the general setting, and the characters and their relationships should flow around them like water.
Then there was the love triangle thing. Nothing ruins an otherwise passable work of anything more quickly for me than a good old fashioned love triangle, but this one was especially horrible. Sometimes it was an essential part of the plot, while at others it wasn't even there, and worst of all, the characters involved shifted completely just to fit its ultimate resolution. The last couple of chapters seemed to come absolutely out of nowhere, as if a happy ending was some sort of contractual obligation and everything needed to be smushed quickly together in order for it to be possible.
I think what bothered me most about the whole affair was that the losing side of the triangle was the only one who really had any personality. Katniss, as I said before, kept putting me in mind of Faith, which is both a good thing and a bad thing - while Faith is undeniably a BAMF, if you take her out of the world of Mirror's Edge and all of the crazy amazing stuff she does there, she really isn't all that memorable a character. What you remember is the style of the world surrounding her, and I think Katniss suffers from the same problem. Peeta I honestly never got a sense of as an actual person; he was just too perfect, too well-spoken and sensitive for me to see him as anything other than a kind of angelic fantasy construct. When he wasn't actively in a scene, I'd forget that he was part of the story entirely. Which leaves Gale, who actually had a reasonably interesting, layered character, and who supposedly turned into a psychotic asshole at the end just so Katniss and Peeta could go have babies ever after, completely disregarding (in my mind, at least) what little Katniss had been built up as from the start. It's as if the author wrote each volume with a completely different set of characters in mind each time, but gave them all the same names and backstory.
Why are there so many of these stories that would have been good had the huge, pulsating relationship tumors been excised from them early on, before they spread and started infecting everything else?
I wanted to enjoy the series because I really liked everything that had been laid out in the first book, and I wanted to see where it would go; unfortunately, as the plot wore on, I found myself stopping more and more frequently to think about how I would have changed it. The most frustrating part is that it wasn't bad, not by a long shot; there was just so much that could have been a lot better.
May as well start with the good bits -- I loved the writing style. It was simple but very effective; the visuals were clean and clear, and I had a wonderful sense of Katniss as a character and her intense survival instinct. She actually reminded me very much of Faith from Mirror's Edge, and all that that entails. The pacing was great, and the general story held my interest well enough that I devoured all three volumes within two days.
The descriptions of the excesses of the Capitol were completely fabulous - it sounded like a huge, constant anime con. The crazy body modification in particular was quite fun to read about, although I found the descriptions of the costumes a bit underwhelming at times. On the other end of the spectrum, I also loved how alive District 12 was, even in its awfulness.
The action in the Games themselves was very well written, and the tactical accuracy was quite nice. I certainly felt all of the wounds, burns, hunger, and thirst while I was reading, and the clever traps and changes made to the arenas kept things interesting.
I did find plenty of side characters to love, as is so often the case with me. The entire District 12 prep team was very fun, and my particular favorites were Cinna and Haymitch. I would have loved to hear more about some of the other tributes, particularly the previous victors in the second book.
Now for the bad; pretty much everything else. The first book was exciting and compelling, up until maybe the last fifth. The second was less immediately compelling, although still interesting, and the third was just kind of a slow descent into awkward badness. All of the political machinations seemed really cartoony and forced, and there was just such an air of contrivance about the plot that I found it hard to take seriously past a certain point. It was as if the setting evolved to fit the romantic elements, which is something that I, as a writer, completely despise and constantly agonize about how best to avoid -- plot points should be rocks anchored deep in the soil of the general setting, and the characters and their relationships should flow around them like water.
Then there was the love triangle thing. Nothing ruins an otherwise passable work of anything more quickly for me than a good old fashioned love triangle, but this one was especially horrible. Sometimes it was an essential part of the plot, while at others it wasn't even there, and worst of all, the characters involved shifted completely just to fit its ultimate resolution. The last couple of chapters seemed to come absolutely out of nowhere, as if a happy ending was some sort of contractual obligation and everything needed to be smushed quickly together in order for it to be possible.
I think what bothered me most about the whole affair was that the losing side of the triangle was the only one who really had any personality. Katniss, as I said before, kept putting me in mind of Faith, which is both a good thing and a bad thing - while Faith is undeniably a BAMF, if you take her out of the world of Mirror's Edge and all of the crazy amazing stuff she does there, she really isn't all that memorable a character. What you remember is the style of the world surrounding her, and I think Katniss suffers from the same problem. Peeta I honestly never got a sense of as an actual person; he was just too perfect, too well-spoken and sensitive for me to see him as anything other than a kind of angelic fantasy construct. When he wasn't actively in a scene, I'd forget that he was part of the story entirely. Which leaves Gale, who actually had a reasonably interesting, layered character, and who supposedly turned into a psychotic asshole at the end just so Katniss and Peeta could go have babies ever after, completely disregarding (in my mind, at least) what little Katniss had been built up as from the start. It's as if the author wrote each volume with a completely different set of characters in mind each time, but gave them all the same names and backstory.
Why are there so many of these stories that would have been good had the huge, pulsating relationship tumors been excised from them early on, before they spread and started infecting everything else?
I wanted to enjoy the series because I really liked everything that had been laid out in the first book, and I wanted to see where it would go; unfortunately, as the plot wore on, I found myself stopping more and more frequently to think about how I would have changed it. The most frustrating part is that it wasn't bad, not by a long shot; there was just so much that could have been a lot better.