The Hunger Games | Catching Fire

Young Adult books have to walk a line that most other books do not: the storytelling has to be terrific up and down to make up for the depth and narrative gravity they lack by design. This means that if any part of the storytelling sucks – dialog, pacing, description, characters, even names – the whole book falls apart. YA books are either really good or really bad with little space in between. Suzanne Collins has produced a series that clears the bar of “really good” in The Hunger Games.

The Hunger Games – both the name of the series and the first book – is mature work from someone who understands how to write within the medium. This is for good reason – Collins has been writing children’s programming for years, often to acclaim. In the first part of this decade she wrote The Underworld Chronicles, which was a very popular series, but it did not blow up crazy like The Hunger Games has, spending 60 consecutive weeks as a New York Times Bestseller with 1.5 million books in print in 26 languages and 38 countries.

(If you aren’t hip to publishing stats, both of those figures are ridiculous huge, like Stephen King big hit huge, and would be borderline totally insane if not for the phenomena that was HP and Ronnie the Fucking Bear.)

So Suzanne Collins knows what she’s doing and the books are popular. A book’s popularity by no means makes it good, no matter the genre. (read: The DaVinci Code lololol Dan Brown lolol) In this case, though, the popularity of the books is an indicator of the quality of the writing.

The story follows Katniss Everdeen, a girl in her late teens living in post-apocalyptic America, now called Panem. Some bad shit went down generations ago and now a cruel, totalitarian government rules 12 districts from The Capital, a shiny, fortified citadel situated somewhere in the Rocky Mountains. Her family lives in the far-outlying District 12, a mining area somewhere in the Appalachians – her father died in the coal mines, and her mother works as what amounts to a folk-healing nurse. If not for Katniss’ hunting ability and her willingness to flaunt the rules, her family would starve, because pretty much everyone in their district is super poor.

In fact, everyone is poor everywhere except for The Capital. This would not be much of a story if that’s all there was to it.

The book’s name derives from the eponymous event held each year in which each District is compelled to send one male and one female child aged 12 to 18 to compete in a fight to the death. The Games are televised and watching the broadcasts is mandatory. The contestants are drawn at random, with each child having their names put in once for every year of eligibility – and there are some particularly sinister mechanical details in the system beyond that. For instance, a child can earn extra, meager government rations of food or fuel for their families each year by putting their name in the draw additional times.

This isn’t a new idea for a story – Stephen King’s The Running Man and The Long Walk covered similar ground, and way way back in the BC day you can find similar stories about Athens sending kids to get eaten up by the minotaur at the order of Crete. It is an old story, but it is one that inspires some very strong, basic emotions. You know a government has you by the balls when they can kill you at any time, but it is a special kind of sinister, total domination to kill your kids for sport.

The whole point of The Hunger Games is an exercise of power by The Capital over the Districts. The Games are a punishment levied against the Districts for a past rebellion against the government. District 13 tried to rise up and The Capital nuked it into oblivion, and now every year 24 kids are sent to an almost certain doom. The victor of The Hunger Games is elevated to freakish celebrity status: they are given wealth and opulence, but the government still exerts power over the survivors – they are forced to train each year’s crop of new contestants.

So that, in a nutshell, is the basis of the story. Collins’ telling of the tale is decidedly competent if not bordering on very good, but what really makes the book is the pacing. Collins can write action incredibly well, and the setup is totally compelling. These two aspects of the book combined with its ease of readability also make it a fast and satisfying experience. I never felt any drag.

The expert pacing is even more evident in Catching Fire, the second book. In The Hunger Games, the story is relentless action from start to finish. Catching Fire showcases Collins’ ability to deftly balance suspense and action in equal measure, which is an area where plenty of authors of more “serious” literature fall short.

I think the problems with these books are probably genre issues more than shortcomings with these specific stories. The characters are pretty thin, and the universe of the story is a bit one-dimensional. There’s also some hokey boy-girl stuff that feels a little forced and inauthentic, especially within the first-person context of the story. These criticisms might be a little unfair, being the comparatively small stuff that they are, but I have high standards – my YA measuring sticks are Harry Potter and Stephen King’s Eye of the Dragon.

So, if you enjoy books that are fun to read and good storytelling, you should get on this train. The third book in the trilogy, Mockingjay, will be out by the end of the month, so I’m not selling you a series where the last book is nowhere in sight. I enjoyed reading these books, and I’m looking forward to Mockingjay.

Score: The Hunger Games | Catching Fire gets a 4 out of 5.