The Hunger Games - Book Review

A book I recently finished reading, titled 'The Hunger Games', was actually a very well-written and interesting novel. I'd been wanting to read it for awhile when I first spotted it at Barnes & Noble. I read it in about two days. This book is the first in a trilogy. It begins telling the story of a world after some sort of post-apocalyptic world, where all of North America has been divided into 12 districts with a capitol in the center and has been renamed Panem. It is told from the perspective of a teenage girl named Katniss Everdeen, a sixteen-year-old who is forced to provide for herself, her younger sister, and her mother, after her father dies in a coal-mining accident. Katniss lives in a very poor district, District 12. In order to feed and support her family, she must sneak under the fence of her district boundaries to hunt for animals for food and trade for other items in town. Of all the districts, District 12 is the most poor and weak, as apposed to the Capitol where only the rich live. The 'capitol people' , as Katniss says, run all of the districts. They claim that the districts were created to maintain peace and keep another war like the one that destroyed the United States to happen. There actually used to be 13 districts, until that district tried to overthrow The Capitol and was destroyed. So, to keep order and power in the districts, The Capitol invented the Hunger Games.

The Hunger Games are a yearly competition between one boy and one girl from each district between the ages of 12 and 18. The contestants are kept in a nice hotel for a week at The Capitol, cleaned up, and given a chance to gain sponsors. Then they are dropped into an arena where they are unfamiliar and on their own, and forced to fight to the death where only one can win. Additionally, the entire thing is broadcast on television, and all the districts are forced to watch.

Katniss makes it clear that she considers the competition a death sentence, everyone in District 12 did. Especially when there were kids from wealthier districts who train their entire lives for the Hunger Games and consider them an honor. But she still has to risk putting her name in the tessarae, multiple times a year. See, every 12-18 year old in all the districts has the name put in a drawing at least once to be drawn for the Hunger Games each year. But, anyone can choose to put their name in another 3 times for a years supply of grain and water for one person, this is called the tessarae. This year, Katniss' name is in the drawing 22 times. Katniss refuses to let her younger sister, Primrose (a.k.a Prim), put her name in the tessarae because she is very protective over her. This year will be the first year Prim is eligible to compete in the Hunger Games.

The Hunger Games are fast approaching and all the kids able to compete