Book Review: The Hunger Games

I recently read The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins. The story is set in a distopian future, where one city conquered the world and reminds all their subjects of their place once a year by forcing each city to send a couple children as tribute to play in a deathmatch contest.

The underlying idea has potential to be turned into a good book, unfortunately this is not it. This is a world with the political depth of a twelve-year old girl. The remaining population of the world seems to be less than you would find in Delaware. And to make the whole thing even less believable, the whole world consists of the current United States. Yet these down-trodden people never even consider the idea that they could just leave the stupid place they are in.

The whole story shoehorns the characters into a vicious gladiatorial contest where a bunch of children are thrown into a wilderness and have to kill each other to win. But the problem is that we know that is where we are going and the journey there is too railroaded, and once we get there, the kids don't seem to want to do it, and so we get a boring series of scenes with the main character hiding in the wilderness. And then they go and change the rules to ex machina allow the budding romance to proceed, letting there be two winners instead of just one. At that point the reader knows what is going to happen: main character is going to survive and take her boyfriend with her. The whole book seems to be trying to give you a sense of danger, but it never quite gets there.

I guess you might like this book if you are a ten-year-old boy, but there are so many book out there that are so much better, so don't waste your time.

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