Premise
A post apocalyptic science fiction about politics and rebellion through the eyes of a young adult. Katniss Everdeen finds herself as a player in the hunger games and fights for her survival only to find she has sparked off a fully fledged rebellion in the process. Does the rebellion succeed?
What to anticipate
A key feature about young adult novels is the complete scanner a ‘teen’ goes through. How does the protagonist deal with the world? With adults? With survival? “The Hunger Games” trilogy is a superbly executed piece of literature that aims to provide a world which is so distraught and rotten with corruption that the reader is able to immediately identify a lot many aspects of the fiction with our own contemporary real world.
With a setting that has such resonance with our times, the book right away becomes a base for interesting theories to recover from such downgraded a situation. Suzanne Collins decides to go take the rebellion-by-the-people way and carves a story that entangles warfare with technology, strategy and politics, entertainment along with violence. A story that takes place in the future has many classical overtones and performs a solid punch when describes scenes of survival in the games (Hunger Games, Catching Fire), or battle ground in Mokingjay or strategies being garnered in all the three books. The book has a good built up from the “Hunger Games” where we get the first taste of the level of atrocities being carried out, to “Catching Fire”, that for the first time gives a whiff of a revolution in the making and finally Mokingjay which delivers on promised battlefronts and plenty of emotional upheavals that become a byproduct of our beloved characters and their suffering.
The book becomes a satire on media and entertainment industry and comments on what the spectacle of suffering of others means for an audience watching it all in the format of a reality show, sitting on their comfortable couches at home and gazing at the TV. It focuses on how even love is packaged and sold to appease the sponsors and the viewers in the first book. It points to the obliviousness and indifference of human beings to the suffering of fellow human beings and it does so very well by showcasing the citizens of Capitol and contrasting them with the players of Hunger games.
The only grievance one would find is that it focuses a bit too much on a love triangle throughout the three books that might not be very realistic with the jarringly dangerous activities that are going on otherwise in the protagonist’s life. However that is an element which is marketed formula to appease young readers as well.