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.
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