Books: The Hunger Games
Well, having taken 9 or 10 months to crank my way through The Crimson Petal and the White, I managed to finish off The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins in under a fortnight.
The story moves at a cracking pace, and it was absolutely wonderful to read an action-packed story like this with a female lead. What really interests me, though, is the style of the prose. It's quite simple -- stark, almost. Not clunky exactly, but at times seeming a bit workman-like. There was nothing beautiful in Collins' writing style, and so the emotional climaxes were, for me, not very climactic. And yet there is a real page-turning quality, despite the fact that I had already seen the flim, and already knew the majority of the plot. Perhaps I should reserve judgement for the second book (which I will most certainly be reading asap), where I don't know what to expect.
One of the things I loved the most was the real originality in the setting. I don't read a lot of YA fiction, or even much sci fi these days, so maybe this has been done before, but I've never read about a future quite like this. It's all very shocking at first, but the world is so internally consistent that it sucks you in and soon you're not even batting an eyelid at people with bright purple hair and wearing outrageous make-up. The decadence of the capitol versus the crushing poverty of the outer districts is the perfect setting for this kind of Roman gladiatorial spectacle of brutality. And also the perfect breeding ground for discontent and rebellion -- I suspect revolt is in the air in the next book.
As well as having a female lead, it was also wonderful to see characters of colour, who often get erased in these future settings. A real shame, then, that Collins fell into the trap of using the death of Rue, a little black girl, to drive the character growth and plotline of Katniss, the white heroine (she's described as olive-skinned in the books, which to me usually means latina or mixed race or some other non-white background, but her mother and sister are both fair-haired and blue-eyed, and I have experience of white authors using confusing descriptors, so my default assumption is going to be that she is caucasian). Again, though, I am reserving judgement until the second book, to see if there are any more CoC's and what their fates may be.
The story moves at a cracking pace, and it was absolutely wonderful to read an action-packed story like this with a female lead. What really interests me, though, is the style of the prose. It's quite simple -- stark, almost. Not clunky exactly, but at times seeming a bit workman-like. There was nothing beautiful in Collins' writing style, and so the emotional climaxes were, for me, not very climactic. And yet there is a real page-turning quality, despite the fact that I had already seen the flim, and already knew the majority of the plot. Perhaps I should reserve judgement for the second book (which I will most certainly be reading asap), where I don't know what to expect.
One of the things I loved the most was the real originality in the setting. I don't read a lot of YA fiction, or even much sci fi these days, so maybe this has been done before, but I've never read about a future quite like this. It's all very shocking at first, but the world is so internally consistent that it sucks you in and soon you're not even batting an eyelid at people with bright purple hair and wearing outrageous make-up. The decadence of the capitol versus the crushing poverty of the outer districts is the perfect setting for this kind of Roman gladiatorial spectacle of brutality. And also the perfect breeding ground for discontent and rebellion -- I suspect revolt is in the air in the next book.
As well as having a female lead, it was also wonderful to see characters of colour, who often get erased in these future settings. A real shame, then, that Collins fell into the trap of using the death of Rue, a little black girl, to drive the character growth and plotline of Katniss, the white heroine (she's described as olive-skinned in the books, which to me usually means latina or mixed race or some other non-white background, but her mother and sister are both fair-haired and blue-eyed, and I have experience of white authors using confusing descriptors, so my default assumption is going to be that she is caucasian). Again, though, I am reserving judgement until the second book, to see if there are any more CoC's and what their fates may be.