book review: Hunger Games trilogy
The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins.
Overall, this is a pretty damn good series for YA, a far cry from the emo gothic supernatural teenage relationship wangst fests that dominate the entire genre. Is it perfect, no. Could there have been things done better? Oh yeah. Especially the ending and the love triangle. But it’s involving and engaging and none of the main characters are too stupid to live. Most of them don’t live anyway, but that’s something else. I would recommend it, definitely. It’s worth reading even if there are some sloggy parts you just have to get through and the love triangle is kind of a why. Seriously, how complicated and paranoid and screwed up the relationship between Katniss and Peeta is interesting enough without Gale hanging around at the outskirts and screwing it up. It would have been better if he just got protective of Katniss as a brother-type instead, because seriously it is a worrisome relationship because of the situations and mindsets it takes place in. Basically the love triangle is not necessary but it only really gets out of hand in the second book, otherwise you can mostly ignore it in favor of the other pretty awesome, if very dark, things happening around it.
So let’s start with Katniss, the female protagonist. I have problems with female narrators, most of the reasons for which I have recently figured out tie into my asexuality or whatever you want to call it. When I read a book with male main characters or written in a male POV, I expect them to have a sex drive. Because that’s...the big old gigantic scientifically proven stereotype, that sex is on the male mind every ten seconds. This doesn’t bother me. I’m not a dude, so I’m not expected to synch with that biological make-up and urges, and reading (or writing) about it is basically like “sure, of course. I expect this and understand it, but don’t jive the same way”. I am, however, expected to synch with a female biological make-up and urges, which I don’t, which makes me extremely uncomfortable being in girl character’s heads where they are feeling and doing things that I can’t identify with but am supposed to, not even just in books but in real life. Female characters give me a sense of alienation and wrongness because I don’t feel or want things the same way they do, and it makes me uncomfortable to read about, and write about.
So therefore, I like and have an easy time being in Katniss’s head because she is practically asexual herself. Not that she actually is, but that sex and marriage and children and boyfriends are the absolute last thing on her mind and the last thing she cares about. At the beginning of the first book where she starts off sixteen years old, all she wants to do is survive, keep her family alive, and get out of the years in which she and her sister and Gale are applicable for the Hunger Games. She outright states that she never wants to get married or have children, and frankly most of her teenage liaisons with both potential love-interests are very sterile and uncompelling physically. She is not really swayed or overcome by any sexual urges; they don’t drive her in any way. Her relationship with Peeta is completely fabricated through the propaganda of the Games in the first book, and even when she’s playing along with it she’s thinking things like, “oh, maybe I should kiss him or something now. That looks good for the cameras”. Even in the second book, which is the obnoxious love-triangle book, her feelings are never very physical - they are mental. Which is what I identify with. She bounces back and forth between the two boys not based on how handsome or sexually appealing they are (it is mentioned, several times, by other characters, that both Gale and Peeta are pretty damn hot, but this never crosses Katniss’s mind, ever. By the third book she’s practically stopped mentioning what they even look like, including basic characteristics like hair color. Additionally she is completely unaffected by the guy who is pretty much known nation-wide as being the hottest damn thing to ever live, and instead becomes good friends with him with absolutely no sexual thoughts included-Harry Potter remarks on the attractiveness of other male characters more than Katniss does) but based on how much emotional attachment she feels towards them at the moment, which is usually related to the level of suffering the guy is going through at the moment. When Gale and Peeta are having their man-to-man-talk-about-Katniss in the third book, even Gale says that she’ll pick one of them based on emotional survival, not any other factors. Emotional attachment I get and understand, and Katniss’s draw to both boys is so very not based on physicality that she does not make me uncomfortable as a character. Even though she is one of those people who can’t make up their minds between ‘which boy do I reaaaaally love’, the fact that it’s based entirely on emotional connection and support makes it 100x more palatable.
I also like her because she has obvious strengths and weaknesses, ones which are unusual ones for female protagonists. She is unable to fake social expectations and is not very friendly or outgoing or approachable; in fact she’s kind of surly and strange, but she is also passionate and determined and a survivor, which keeps her likeable. She is not verbally witty or good at using words to communicate much at all, and she never really gets any better at it except one or two times; her most compelling aspects are her actions done at the right times and with strong meaning, not her words. She’s intelligent in some situations and not in others-she isn’t emotionally intuitive, but as far as logic and strategy goes, she can figure out a lot of things and her mind works quickly. She gives two shits about her physical appearance, she doesn’t know or care if she’s pretty and most marks of beauty in the canon of her world she finds ridiculous. She has an intense skill at archery which isn’t just fabricated out of nowhere for a Mary-Sue power; it makes sense for her background and it helps her through the entire series, it’s never just dropped or forgotten about. Her worst skills are with interacting with people, understanding people, and liking people. She is pretty consistently characterized, some of her weaknesses stay weaknesses for the whole book, and some of them she overcomes for certain situations but some she never does.
The first book is by far the best one, it could almost stand alone other than the clear lead at the end into political rebellion and such, but the premise is solid and it’s exciting. And dark, seriously dark. It’s basically Battle Royale meets the ‘Athenian girls and boys get sacrificed to the minotaur’ myth (and actually apparently that was one of Collin’s inspirations-despite a lot of names being heavily Roman sounding. Brothers named Castor and Pollux, come on. Also the Avox, which literally means ‘without voice/sound’ in Latin), and you know that every character in the arena with Katniss is going to die. The question is how, and also how Katniss is going to stay alive, and also the twists that the Gamemakers keep throwing into the arena (such as the two survivors rule). It’s brutal and aggressive but really engaging. Seeing the strengths and survival instincts of all the other characters is constantly interesting, also the obstacles that the arena throws at the kids-it’s all very creative and kind of twisted. The whole thing with Katniss and Peeta is tolerable because Katniss isn’t into it. She plays it like a tool for survival, which she honestly thinks it is even though to a reader it’s pretty obvious Peeta is playing it for real. But Katniss isn’t swept off her teenage feet by a guy suddenly professing his undying love for her and promising to keep her alive at any cost in the arena-she sees it as a tool Peeta is using for survival and when she’s forced to use it as well, she isn’t good at it. I liked that about Katniss-not that she was awkward with boys, which she actually isn’t, but that she’s not good at faking emotions. She had no idea how to fake falling in love with Peeta for the cameras, even though she clearly comes to care about him as a person (helped by the tiny bit of history they have). And by the end of the book she still isn’t overwhelmed by feelings for him. It’s a nice break from how it would happen in pretty much all YA, I think, where the slightest bit of attention a girl gets from a boy makes her crazy for him instantly.
The worldbuilding of the story is also pretty interesting. I though the beauty ideals in the Capitol (dying your skin, sparkly tattoos) were actually pretty cool ideas to where you could see how it’s basically like overblown cosmetics gone out of hand, and since it’s a futuristic society. Katniss’s district is so poor and run down it actually takes a while to realize that they have technology, and actually some of it is very advanced but civilians don’t really have much access to it, and most of it is in the Capitol. Katniss lives in a mining district where the most advanced tech is probably television. When she’s taken into the Capitol for the games you get slowly introduced to more and more technology like the hovercrafts and things but because we open up in such a backwoods area where Katniss uses a bow and arrow to hunt and it’s a dystopian future I kind of was imagining a wasteland of technology at first. But there’s technology throughout the rest of the series but sometimes it kind of surprised me when something high-tech showed up.
Overall I gave the book an 8.5/10, and the only thing that kept it from being a 9 (that’s the highest rating I give, nothing ever gets a 10) is the misplaced and very forced “OMG I think I love Gale” right in the damn middle of the death-arena where it has no place being. More talk of this in the spoiler section.
The second books drags a bit in the beginning/first half. It’s the love triangle thing, which is not as awful as I was expecting but it’s just...not done all that well. Better than Twilight’s, but it’s not like that’s a real high bar to pass. In the spoiler half of the review I talk more about the way I think it could have actually been good, but the way it is, it’s just not that impressive and mostly it’s like ‘seriously, Katniss, you don’t love Gale. Quit it’. Then, when the Quarter Quell happens and the theme is announced, that was the point in the series where, out loud, I was like, “OH MY GOD OH SHITTTTTT SON”. And I don’t react that intensely to twists in books very often (the last one was Robert Charles Wilson’s Spin). The book picks right the hell up again after that and basically doesn’t stop until the ending. The slow, kind of meandering first part did knock a half a point off of my rating of the book though, and frankly I don’t actually remember most of that part of the book. This one gets just an 8.
The third book is the rebel war. I think it was well-done (and man, love triangle business kind of completely disappeared, Katniss barely thinks about relationships in a very logical and sensible mindset, also she’s kind of understandably crazy through most of the book) but it does have a different feel from the other two books. I think the trap pods at the last half were supposed to put not only Katniss but the reader in the same mindset of the Games, and even if they were effective traps it seems kind of arbitrary to fight your war like complete cowards. Reading this book (and the others) makes you completely paranoid. You don’t trust anybody’s motives and you’re usually right not to do so (except if it’s Peeta). But because of a few major issues I had with this book it also gets just an 8 (almost a 7.5, goddamn that epilogue, goddamn it.)
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(spoilers below)
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That Love Triangle Thing
It was obvious it was going to be Peeta at the end, even from the start of the love triangle, maybe even the start of the series. If it had been done better, might have actually had some real dynamic tension, but a reader can tell, even if Katniss can’t, that she’s far more emotionally involved in Peeta. Gale is like a brother that has her back, that understands her and grew up the same way she did with near identical childhoods; he’s like family, and while she obviously loves him, it’s not the “in love” type of love. I think the triangle would have worked better if she didn’t decide, halfway and randomly through the first book, that she might be in love with Gale. He’s not even there, and she suddenly has this giant twist of feelings for him that felt very forced and like an irrevocable set-up for the love triangle. My roommate argued that sometimes people do just realize things like that out of nowhere, but in the situation Katniss is in (a life-or-death survival gauntlet game of death), that’s probably the last thing she should be thinking about. Like, thinking about Gale wouldn’t be weird, but I don’t know, the way it happened in the book just struck me was really forced and arbitrary.
The best and most well-done part of the whole issue is in the second book, when Katniss is thinking and realizing that she is trapped forever into her fake relationship with Peeta, that after the Victory Tour they will still be revisited by the Capitol’s cameras and will expected to be mentors for other Game participants and that she will never be out of the public eye and that she doesn’t have a choice except to be eventually married to Peeta, eventually forced to have children with Peeta, all with the attention of the public on her and expecting nothing less. That was well done, because you really see how upsetting and claustrophobic and oppressive that would be, especially to a teenager. The moment when she sees Gale after he was publically whipped is the most natural and understandable moment where you could see that Katniss might think she’s in love with him, and if that moment had begun the triangle, not the odd wishy-washy distant feelings started in the arena, I would have bought into it way better, especially combined with her feelings about being trapped forever with Peeta with no choice at all. The dramatic tension was all there, in theory, but it was just scattered around in strange spots where it didn’t come together as believably as it could have.
Other Stuff
The payoff with District 13 was well done. Name-dropped in the first book a few times to no real immediate purpose, and then becomes much more mentioned in the second, but doesn’t even appear until the 3rd, where it’s a huge main thing. But it was Chekov’s gun’d in there really well and when you’re reading thing thinking, ‘where the hell can they escape to, exactly’, you’ve got District 13 suddenly popping up and making complete sense. It was well done in a way that was missing from Jordan Castillo Price’s ‘Zero Hour’, which had a similar futuristic dystopia in it but there was no worked-in place to escape to for the characters, who ended up just dead-ending in the middle of the woods for an anticlimactic dud of an ending (I was reading these stories close together, which is why the comparison happened in my mind).
So many people die. Seriously, you think JK Rowling or GRRM killed a lot of people arbitrarily, just read this series. Expect every character to die. If they aren’t a POV character or a love interest. They are probably gonna die. This is expected in the first and second books with the Games, and to an extent in the third with there being a war, but seriously. Everybody. Finnick and Annie became this series’ Remus and Tonks-a sudden romantic relationship kind of out of nowhere (at least their wedding was a bigger deal), a pregnancy not mentioned until one sentence nearly at the end of the book, and Finnick dies. Like, seriously, I was trying to figure out how, in any way, Annie giving birth to a son could be construed as happy, the way Katniss sees it. The kid’s dad died hideously in a war and Annie is half fucking insane. That kid’s gonna have a screwed up home life no matter what. I guess it’s some hippie-dippy “new life is woooooooooooonderful and look at how we can bring a new innocent life into this goddamn awful world even though everything is so goddamn awful” school of thought that I completely don’t agree with-it’s not always rainbows and sunshine and world peace when a baby happens. Sometimes a baby really should not happen. But this is YMMV and I’m sure lots of people don’t agree.
Prim’s death in the third book was pointless. It did nothing. Except, I suppose, fuck up the possibility of Gale/Katniss. Because of really weird character logic on Katniss’s end. It also completely undermined the entire inflammatory event which began the story-Prim’s name being drawn for the Hunger Games and Katniss volunteering herself in her place. So basically, everything Katniss did was based on a sacrifice that eventually became completely irrelevant. Prim died anyway. I didn’t find that meaningful or circular in any kind of way. Katniss’s grief scene is well-done, but other than that Prim’s death didn’t affect anything, because it happened way too late in the book, except again probably fucking up the Gale/Katniss thing. Gale’s sarcastic little “well I guess my chance was over when I failed to protect your family” turned out to be not sarcastic at all. And it was so close to the end that it was just kind of like....oh. Well. You didn’t see it affect Katniss and her mother for any length of time in the future.
The Ending
The ending feels completely rushed, like Collins didn’t get enough time to finish it or something. From the moment Katniss kills Coin, the book starts a slow and uneventful downhill sludge towards the epilogue. Gale completely disappears from the book; there is no real resolution with him and in fact the dissolution of his and Katniss’s friendship doesn’t even seem to bother her-she never mentions him again, what he’s doing, if she ever sees him again in her entire life. I like friendship dynamics, I like them a lot, and Gale was more of a brother/friend to her and the fact that he just up and leaves the book was such a depressing loose end that could have been handled way better. There was some kind of cheap throwaway thing about her never being able to see him the same way again after it was his human trap idea that killed Prim (throwaway, because even if he came up with it it’s super unlikely that he actually had the authority to choose to use it there and it was only a major coincidence that Prim was there at the time, yet Katniss reacts like Gale knew her sister would be there and also lead the bombing run on his own or something and because she has this idea he has no respect for human life because he’s basically following a (understandable) ends-justify-the-means approach to the war) so I assume that was meant to be the end-all to a possible relationship with him, but it was super weak. She doesn’t actually end up choosing; she utterly eliminates Gale as a possibility due to something unrelated and therefore settles for Peeta. Also, you never hear from Katniss’s mother again, she up and disappears from the book same as Gale. Katniss and Peeta get back together in a single line, which is also a damn cheap tactic because they basically had to start their “relationship” over again after Peeta was hijacked; not even a (essentially new) romantic relationship, but a relationship where Peeta did not want to outright murder her. But it’s done in a single line, and then they have some of the vaguest vaguey prose sex of all time. And then the fucking epilogue. The epilogue in which it is twenty years later and Katniss and Peeta are (assumedly) married and have two kids.
This is what the epilogue says to me. No matter how badass you are, no matter what your previous thoughts and wants and opinions were, no matter what you did or accomplished or achieved, no matter what wars you won or people you saved, it all comes down to getting hitched and popping out children.
Katniss doesn’t even name her children in the epilogue, and in fact the way she speaks about them is massively upsetting. She refers to them as ‘the girl’ and ‘the boy’, says she basically had them because Peeta wanted them and it took him fifteen years to convince her, and she sounds incredibly removed and distanced from them, with no feeling of any real sentiment or connection to them. It’s actually a more disturbing epilogue than Harry Potter, which was just an excuse for goofy names and bad canon fanfiction. I practically want to read into it that Katniss has post-partum depression or something, because of how creepy the fucking epilogue is. I think it maybe have been intended to be dreamlike and surreal, but it comes off as massively goddamn disturbing. It especially creeps me out because it’s stated that Peeta took fifteen solid years of convincing her to have kids, and if you have that type of relationship, where one person desperately wants something huge and life-changing while the other clearly doesn’t and actively resists it for that long-you are a terrible couple. In fact, even though I liked Peeta as a character better than Gale, I never thought he and Katniss were a good couple. Didn’t like Gale either, not as a romantic pairing. Basically I’m against teenage characters getting together that early and staying together forever especially when it’s their first relationship and when the relationship happens at the end of a book and you don’t actually see them having to work out that relationship or what happens when they get into their twenties and become completely different people. Yeah, some people in real life can do that but all YA books assume that you meet your soul-mate at fifteen and the only drama is the getting together part and then it’s smooth sailing forever. Except Animorphs, they did that shit completely right.
Also, these kinds of epilogues, which ignore everything interesting going on in the world and the character’s lives, leave out things you actually want to know about. What is Panem like now, twenty years later? Who’s the president, how are the districts working out being unified, what’s the Capitol doing, is peace steady or is it going to fall apart again into new wars? AUGH FUCK YOU EPILOGUE, FUCK YOUR BABY-MAKING AND MARRIAGE. NOT WHAT I AM INTERESTED IN. Harry Potter was exactly the same! You didn’t know any of the characters’ jobs, where they lived, what their lives were like, what the world was like after Voldemort’s defeat, treatment of pure-bloods versus muggle-borns in wizarding society, prejudices, politics, none of that-just fucking children everywhere. Godddamn. Stop doing this. You people undermine the entire rest of your badass book series with these family-packed fairy-tale endings. Quit it now. In all honesty both Katniss and Harry Potter should be traumatized unstable recluses with severe problems coping with regular life (and it is mentioned, at least, that Katniss has still got some lingering issues 20 years later), not completely well-adjusted married parents.
Overall, this is a pretty damn good series for YA, a far cry from the emo gothic supernatural teenage relationship wangst fests that dominate the entire genre. Is it perfect, no. Could there have been things done better? Oh yeah. Especially the ending and the love triangle. But it’s involving and engaging and none of the main characters are too stupid to live. Most of them don’t live anyway, but that’s something else. I would recommend it, definitely. It’s worth reading even if there are some sloggy parts you just have to get through and the love triangle is kind of a why. Seriously, how complicated and paranoid and screwed up the relationship between Katniss and Peeta is interesting enough without Gale hanging around at the outskirts and screwing it up. It would have been better if he just got protective of Katniss as a brother-type instead, because seriously it is a worrisome relationship because of the situations and mindsets it takes place in. Basically the love triangle is not necessary but it only really gets out of hand in the second book, otherwise you can mostly ignore it in favor of the other pretty awesome, if very dark, things happening around it.
So let’s start with Katniss, the female protagonist. I have problems with female narrators, most of the reasons for which I have recently figured out tie into my asexuality or whatever you want to call it. When I read a book with male main characters or written in a male POV, I expect them to have a sex drive. Because that’s...the big old gigantic scientifically proven stereotype, that sex is on the male mind every ten seconds. This doesn’t bother me. I’m not a dude, so I’m not expected to synch with that biological make-up and urges, and reading (or writing) about it is basically like “sure, of course. I expect this and understand it, but don’t jive the same way”. I am, however, expected to synch with a female biological make-up and urges, which I don’t, which makes me extremely uncomfortable being in girl character’s heads where they are feeling and doing things that I can’t identify with but am supposed to, not even just in books but in real life. Female characters give me a sense of alienation and wrongness because I don’t feel or want things the same way they do, and it makes me uncomfortable to read about, and write about.
So therefore, I like and have an easy time being in Katniss’s head because she is practically asexual herself. Not that she actually is, but that sex and marriage and children and boyfriends are the absolute last thing on her mind and the last thing she cares about. At the beginning of the first book where she starts off sixteen years old, all she wants to do is survive, keep her family alive, and get out of the years in which she and her sister and Gale are applicable for the Hunger Games. She outright states that she never wants to get married or have children, and frankly most of her teenage liaisons with both potential love-interests are very sterile and uncompelling physically. She is not really swayed or overcome by any sexual urges; they don’t drive her in any way. Her relationship with Peeta is completely fabricated through the propaganda of the Games in the first book, and even when she’s playing along with it she’s thinking things like, “oh, maybe I should kiss him or something now. That looks good for the cameras”. Even in the second book, which is the obnoxious love-triangle book, her feelings are never very physical - they are mental. Which is what I identify with. She bounces back and forth between the two boys not based on how handsome or sexually appealing they are (it is mentioned, several times, by other characters, that both Gale and Peeta are pretty damn hot, but this never crosses Katniss’s mind, ever. By the third book she’s practically stopped mentioning what they even look like, including basic characteristics like hair color. Additionally she is completely unaffected by the guy who is pretty much known nation-wide as being the hottest damn thing to ever live, and instead becomes good friends with him with absolutely no sexual thoughts included-Harry Potter remarks on the attractiveness of other male characters more than Katniss does) but based on how much emotional attachment she feels towards them at the moment, which is usually related to the level of suffering the guy is going through at the moment. When Gale and Peeta are having their man-to-man-talk-about-Katniss in the third book, even Gale says that she’ll pick one of them based on emotional survival, not any other factors. Emotional attachment I get and understand, and Katniss’s draw to both boys is so very not based on physicality that she does not make me uncomfortable as a character. Even though she is one of those people who can’t make up their minds between ‘which boy do I reaaaaally love’, the fact that it’s based entirely on emotional connection and support makes it 100x more palatable.
I also like her because she has obvious strengths and weaknesses, ones which are unusual ones for female protagonists. She is unable to fake social expectations and is not very friendly or outgoing or approachable; in fact she’s kind of surly and strange, but she is also passionate and determined and a survivor, which keeps her likeable. She is not verbally witty or good at using words to communicate much at all, and she never really gets any better at it except one or two times; her most compelling aspects are her actions done at the right times and with strong meaning, not her words. She’s intelligent in some situations and not in others-she isn’t emotionally intuitive, but as far as logic and strategy goes, she can figure out a lot of things and her mind works quickly. She gives two shits about her physical appearance, she doesn’t know or care if she’s pretty and most marks of beauty in the canon of her world she finds ridiculous. She has an intense skill at archery which isn’t just fabricated out of nowhere for a Mary-Sue power; it makes sense for her background and it helps her through the entire series, it’s never just dropped or forgotten about. Her worst skills are with interacting with people, understanding people, and liking people. She is pretty consistently characterized, some of her weaknesses stay weaknesses for the whole book, and some of them she overcomes for certain situations but some she never does.
The first book is by far the best one, it could almost stand alone other than the clear lead at the end into political rebellion and such, but the premise is solid and it’s exciting. And dark, seriously dark. It’s basically Battle Royale meets the ‘Athenian girls and boys get sacrificed to the minotaur’ myth (and actually apparently that was one of Collin’s inspirations-despite a lot of names being heavily Roman sounding. Brothers named Castor and Pollux, come on. Also the Avox, which literally means ‘without voice/sound’ in Latin), and you know that every character in the arena with Katniss is going to die. The question is how, and also how Katniss is going to stay alive, and also the twists that the Gamemakers keep throwing into the arena (such as the two survivors rule). It’s brutal and aggressive but really engaging. Seeing the strengths and survival instincts of all the other characters is constantly interesting, also the obstacles that the arena throws at the kids-it’s all very creative and kind of twisted. The whole thing with Katniss and Peeta is tolerable because Katniss isn’t into it. She plays it like a tool for survival, which she honestly thinks it is even though to a reader it’s pretty obvious Peeta is playing it for real. But Katniss isn’t swept off her teenage feet by a guy suddenly professing his undying love for her and promising to keep her alive at any cost in the arena-she sees it as a tool Peeta is using for survival and when she’s forced to use it as well, she isn’t good at it. I liked that about Katniss-not that she was awkward with boys, which she actually isn’t, but that she’s not good at faking emotions. She had no idea how to fake falling in love with Peeta for the cameras, even though she clearly comes to care about him as a person (helped by the tiny bit of history they have). And by the end of the book she still isn’t overwhelmed by feelings for him. It’s a nice break from how it would happen in pretty much all YA, I think, where the slightest bit of attention a girl gets from a boy makes her crazy for him instantly.
The worldbuilding of the story is also pretty interesting. I though the beauty ideals in the Capitol (dying your skin, sparkly tattoos) were actually pretty cool ideas to where you could see how it’s basically like overblown cosmetics gone out of hand, and since it’s a futuristic society. Katniss’s district is so poor and run down it actually takes a while to realize that they have technology, and actually some of it is very advanced but civilians don’t really have much access to it, and most of it is in the Capitol. Katniss lives in a mining district where the most advanced tech is probably television. When she’s taken into the Capitol for the games you get slowly introduced to more and more technology like the hovercrafts and things but because we open up in such a backwoods area where Katniss uses a bow and arrow to hunt and it’s a dystopian future I kind of was imagining a wasteland of technology at first. But there’s technology throughout the rest of the series but sometimes it kind of surprised me when something high-tech showed up.
Overall I gave the book an 8.5/10, and the only thing that kept it from being a 9 (that’s the highest rating I give, nothing ever gets a 10) is the misplaced and very forced “OMG I think I love Gale” right in the damn middle of the death-arena where it has no place being. More talk of this in the spoiler section.
The second books drags a bit in the beginning/first half. It’s the love triangle thing, which is not as awful as I was expecting but it’s just...not done all that well. Better than Twilight’s, but it’s not like that’s a real high bar to pass. In the spoiler half of the review I talk more about the way I think it could have actually been good, but the way it is, it’s just not that impressive and mostly it’s like ‘seriously, Katniss, you don’t love Gale. Quit it’. Then, when the Quarter Quell happens and the theme is announced, that was the point in the series where, out loud, I was like, “OH MY GOD OH SHITTTTTT SON”. And I don’t react that intensely to twists in books very often (the last one was Robert Charles Wilson’s Spin). The book picks right the hell up again after that and basically doesn’t stop until the ending. The slow, kind of meandering first part did knock a half a point off of my rating of the book though, and frankly I don’t actually remember most of that part of the book. This one gets just an 8.
The third book is the rebel war. I think it was well-done (and man, love triangle business kind of completely disappeared, Katniss barely thinks about relationships in a very logical and sensible mindset, also she’s kind of understandably crazy through most of the book) but it does have a different feel from the other two books. I think the trap pods at the last half were supposed to put not only Katniss but the reader in the same mindset of the Games, and even if they were effective traps it seems kind of arbitrary to fight your war like complete cowards. Reading this book (and the others) makes you completely paranoid. You don’t trust anybody’s motives and you’re usually right not to do so (except if it’s Peeta). But because of a few major issues I had with this book it also gets just an 8 (almost a 7.5, goddamn that epilogue, goddamn it.)
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(spoilers below)
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That Love Triangle Thing
It was obvious it was going to be Peeta at the end, even from the start of the love triangle, maybe even the start of the series. If it had been done better, might have actually had some real dynamic tension, but a reader can tell, even if Katniss can’t, that she’s far more emotionally involved in Peeta. Gale is like a brother that has her back, that understands her and grew up the same way she did with near identical childhoods; he’s like family, and while she obviously loves him, it’s not the “in love” type of love. I think the triangle would have worked better if she didn’t decide, halfway and randomly through the first book, that she might be in love with Gale. He’s not even there, and she suddenly has this giant twist of feelings for him that felt very forced and like an irrevocable set-up for the love triangle. My roommate argued that sometimes people do just realize things like that out of nowhere, but in the situation Katniss is in (a life-or-death survival gauntlet game of death), that’s probably the last thing she should be thinking about. Like, thinking about Gale wouldn’t be weird, but I don’t know, the way it happened in the book just struck me was really forced and arbitrary.
The best and most well-done part of the whole issue is in the second book, when Katniss is thinking and realizing that she is trapped forever into her fake relationship with Peeta, that after the Victory Tour they will still be revisited by the Capitol’s cameras and will expected to be mentors for other Game participants and that she will never be out of the public eye and that she doesn’t have a choice except to be eventually married to Peeta, eventually forced to have children with Peeta, all with the attention of the public on her and expecting nothing less. That was well done, because you really see how upsetting and claustrophobic and oppressive that would be, especially to a teenager. The moment when she sees Gale after he was publically whipped is the most natural and understandable moment where you could see that Katniss might think she’s in love with him, and if that moment had begun the triangle, not the odd wishy-washy distant feelings started in the arena, I would have bought into it way better, especially combined with her feelings about being trapped forever with Peeta with no choice at all. The dramatic tension was all there, in theory, but it was just scattered around in strange spots where it didn’t come together as believably as it could have.
Other Stuff
The payoff with District 13 was well done. Name-dropped in the first book a few times to no real immediate purpose, and then becomes much more mentioned in the second, but doesn’t even appear until the 3rd, where it’s a huge main thing. But it was Chekov’s gun’d in there really well and when you’re reading thing thinking, ‘where the hell can they escape to, exactly’, you’ve got District 13 suddenly popping up and making complete sense. It was well done in a way that was missing from Jordan Castillo Price’s ‘Zero Hour’, which had a similar futuristic dystopia in it but there was no worked-in place to escape to for the characters, who ended up just dead-ending in the middle of the woods for an anticlimactic dud of an ending (I was reading these stories close together, which is why the comparison happened in my mind).
So many people die. Seriously, you think JK Rowling or GRRM killed a lot of people arbitrarily, just read this series. Expect every character to die. If they aren’t a POV character or a love interest. They are probably gonna die. This is expected in the first and second books with the Games, and to an extent in the third with there being a war, but seriously. Everybody. Finnick and Annie became this series’ Remus and Tonks-a sudden romantic relationship kind of out of nowhere (at least their wedding was a bigger deal), a pregnancy not mentioned until one sentence nearly at the end of the book, and Finnick dies. Like, seriously, I was trying to figure out how, in any way, Annie giving birth to a son could be construed as happy, the way Katniss sees it. The kid’s dad died hideously in a war and Annie is half fucking insane. That kid’s gonna have a screwed up home life no matter what. I guess it’s some hippie-dippy “new life is woooooooooooonderful and look at how we can bring a new innocent life into this goddamn awful world even though everything is so goddamn awful” school of thought that I completely don’t agree with-it’s not always rainbows and sunshine and world peace when a baby happens. Sometimes a baby really should not happen. But this is YMMV and I’m sure lots of people don’t agree.
Prim’s death in the third book was pointless. It did nothing. Except, I suppose, fuck up the possibility of Gale/Katniss. Because of really weird character logic on Katniss’s end. It also completely undermined the entire inflammatory event which began the story-Prim’s name being drawn for the Hunger Games and Katniss volunteering herself in her place. So basically, everything Katniss did was based on a sacrifice that eventually became completely irrelevant. Prim died anyway. I didn’t find that meaningful or circular in any kind of way. Katniss’s grief scene is well-done, but other than that Prim’s death didn’t affect anything, because it happened way too late in the book, except again probably fucking up the Gale/Katniss thing. Gale’s sarcastic little “well I guess my chance was over when I failed to protect your family” turned out to be not sarcastic at all. And it was so close to the end that it was just kind of like....oh. Well. You didn’t see it affect Katniss and her mother for any length of time in the future.
The Ending
The ending feels completely rushed, like Collins didn’t get enough time to finish it or something. From the moment Katniss kills Coin, the book starts a slow and uneventful downhill sludge towards the epilogue. Gale completely disappears from the book; there is no real resolution with him and in fact the dissolution of his and Katniss’s friendship doesn’t even seem to bother her-she never mentions him again, what he’s doing, if she ever sees him again in her entire life. I like friendship dynamics, I like them a lot, and Gale was more of a brother/friend to her and the fact that he just up and leaves the book was such a depressing loose end that could have been handled way better. There was some kind of cheap throwaway thing about her never being able to see him the same way again after it was his human trap idea that killed Prim (throwaway, because even if he came up with it it’s super unlikely that he actually had the authority to choose to use it there and it was only a major coincidence that Prim was there at the time, yet Katniss reacts like Gale knew her sister would be there and also lead the bombing run on his own or something and because she has this idea he has no respect for human life because he’s basically following a (understandable) ends-justify-the-means approach to the war) so I assume that was meant to be the end-all to a possible relationship with him, but it was super weak. She doesn’t actually end up choosing; she utterly eliminates Gale as a possibility due to something unrelated and therefore settles for Peeta. Also, you never hear from Katniss’s mother again, she up and disappears from the book same as Gale. Katniss and Peeta get back together in a single line, which is also a damn cheap tactic because they basically had to start their “relationship” over again after Peeta was hijacked; not even a (essentially new) romantic relationship, but a relationship where Peeta did not want to outright murder her. But it’s done in a single line, and then they have some of the vaguest vaguey prose sex of all time. And then the fucking epilogue. The epilogue in which it is twenty years later and Katniss and Peeta are (assumedly) married and have two kids.
This is what the epilogue says to me. No matter how badass you are, no matter what your previous thoughts and wants and opinions were, no matter what you did or accomplished or achieved, no matter what wars you won or people you saved, it all comes down to getting hitched and popping out children.
Katniss doesn’t even name her children in the epilogue, and in fact the way she speaks about them is massively upsetting. She refers to them as ‘the girl’ and ‘the boy’, says she basically had them because Peeta wanted them and it took him fifteen years to convince her, and she sounds incredibly removed and distanced from them, with no feeling of any real sentiment or connection to them. It’s actually a more disturbing epilogue than Harry Potter, which was just an excuse for goofy names and bad canon fanfiction. I practically want to read into it that Katniss has post-partum depression or something, because of how creepy the fucking epilogue is. I think it maybe have been intended to be dreamlike and surreal, but it comes off as massively goddamn disturbing. It especially creeps me out because it’s stated that Peeta took fifteen solid years of convincing her to have kids, and if you have that type of relationship, where one person desperately wants something huge and life-changing while the other clearly doesn’t and actively resists it for that long-you are a terrible couple. In fact, even though I liked Peeta as a character better than Gale, I never thought he and Katniss were a good couple. Didn’t like Gale either, not as a romantic pairing. Basically I’m against teenage characters getting together that early and staying together forever especially when it’s their first relationship and when the relationship happens at the end of a book and you don’t actually see them having to work out that relationship or what happens when they get into their twenties and become completely different people. Yeah, some people in real life can do that but all YA books assume that you meet your soul-mate at fifteen and the only drama is the getting together part and then it’s smooth sailing forever. Except Animorphs, they did that shit completely right.
Also, these kinds of epilogues, which ignore everything interesting going on in the world and the character’s lives, leave out things you actually want to know about. What is Panem like now, twenty years later? Who’s the president, how are the districts working out being unified, what’s the Capitol doing, is peace steady or is it going to fall apart again into new wars? AUGH FUCK YOU EPILOGUE, FUCK YOUR BABY-MAKING AND MARRIAGE. NOT WHAT I AM INTERESTED IN. Harry Potter was exactly the same! You didn’t know any of the characters’ jobs, where they lived, what their lives were like, what the world was like after Voldemort’s defeat, treatment of pure-bloods versus muggle-borns in wizarding society, prejudices, politics, none of that-just fucking children everywhere. Godddamn. Stop doing this. You people undermine the entire rest of your badass book series with these family-packed fairy-tale endings. Quit it now. In all honesty both Katniss and Harry Potter should be traumatized unstable recluses with severe problems coping with regular life (and it is mentioned, at least, that Katniss has still got some lingering issues 20 years later), not completely well-adjusted married parents.