I had sworn I wouldn’t read these, because I’d been told they had cannibalism. On the short list of things that freak me out (clowns, heights, the dentist), cannibalism is at the top. I can handle a lot of topics but anything to do with people eating other people makes me upset in a way that transcends description. So I figured these weren’t the books for me. There were other run-ins with people that prejudiced me against the books (one woman who thought Harry Potter was evil but this book about children killing children was just dandy, ripping fun) and I figured I could live without reading them.
Fast forward to this spring, when two people whose intellectual mettle I respect both read them for the first time. I gave in and bought the first one, saving it to read for my birthday.
The only cannibalism in the first book was a mention that it had happened before and was now outlawed. So I was at ease and breezed through The Hunger Games in about three hours. It was one of those quick, compulsive reads. A good story told with an economy of words that fit the subject matter. I didn’t feel like I was drowning in gore or grimness and the world of the story came well alive in the manner of fairy and folk tales. I liked the book very much. So I dived right into book two, Catching Fire.
That second book expanded nicely upon the world building, showing the protagonists what life was like outside of their walled district. We learned more backstory of ancillary characters and repeated the jeopardy scenario of the first book in a way that worked oddly well. But by the time it was over I found myself rooting through our medicine drawer in search of an old SNRI scrip. The relentless misery of the world of Panem was overtaking me. It was either the Vanity Fair of The Capitol, the Dickensian poverty and lash of the Districts or the desperate, senseless violence of the Arena. What love exists in the book is mocked and denied by the heroine. Katniss clearly knows how to wound, with or without a bow.
I knew I was in trouble when, in an author interview, the books’ creator listed her favourite books. I do not kid when I say that her favourite books were my LEAST favourite books. All of them are dark and dismal accounts of the world–Lord of the Flies, Anna Karenina, Slaugherhouse Five–and that was the story she ended up telling.
Collins clearly had a gripping idea that would have made for a solid one-off novel. We could have had the whole first book, the first half of the second book and the rounded it out with a conclusion which was thematically consistent and true to the characters.
Instead, Collins pads the second book with a rerun (“let’s do The Hunger Games AGAIN”) and then completely goes off the rails in Book Three.
I hate books where the author so obviously has a contempt for her audience and her characters. That contempt blended with her realization that the popularity of the first two books gave her a bully pulpit. So she threw everything that people loved about books 1 & 2 (strong heroine, intriguing romantic options, real and surrogate familial relationships, sense of place) and threw them out the window. In their place Collins gives us an “eff you, war is hell/suck it up” mishmash. She gets to belabor the point about War, What Is It Good For? Absolutely Nothin’ for page after page. Katniss turns from self-sacrificing, self-assured huntress to a cowering, selfish mess. The characters who aren’t killed in order to keep hitting us over the head with her point get to become wholly unrecognizable and completely unsympathetic.
I venture to guess that most readers of these books knew already that War Is Teh Badness. They read YA books about strong heroines conquering darkness as an edifying escape. But Collins wanted to be more than a YA storyteller. And she became less.
Good review. Thanks.
Shame about Collins flogging the horse with a third book. Stunts like that only undermine their credibility and exhaust any reader with the common sense God gave gravel.
I dare say now you’ll be even more hesitant to pick up the next thing she writes. I know I won’t be buying any of it.
I actually asked for my money back on the last book (before I read it) and was able to read a lendable copy. I was just so angry with both the obvious pad-out AND the obvious sermonising.
For all the discussions you and I have been involved in about disliking preaching Christian novels I am afraid I haven’t made clear that I hate preaching in any circumstance. I read for entertainment, not to be yelled at.
It continues to boggle my mind that you don’t recognize Anna Karenina as The Greatest Novel Ever Written.
For all that we are friends, you have to remember that it’s like our friendship transcends not only politics and religion but also taste in literature.
You are, even more than B., the “flip side” of my coin.
Because not only do I think AK is a Depression Sandwich with Grief Mayonnaise, I really really really strongly dislike the stuff of Jane Austen. ::ducks from thrown objects::
I’m starting to wonder why on earth you’d keep me as a friend. It’s because of The Wire, isn’t it?!?
What a silly question. It’s not just because of The Wire; it’s because of The Princess Bride as well.
I have been waiting for your review of this series.
I absolutely loved the first book, and I liked the second one as an extension of the first, too. But the third book kind of pissed me off, mainly for the reasons you listed above. I just feel like there was so much more fleshing out that could have been done of the characters, but instead they just died or went mad.
And I don’t want to post any spoilers, but I’ll say that I was very disappointed in the way the love interest thing played out. How part of it just disappeared—dis-a-freaking-peared!!—and then how what actually happened just got tied up with a neat, boring little bow. Booo.
The love interest thing got me the most, in terms of anger. And that’s saying something because I got really tired of all the themes in Mockingjay pretty quickly.
But the love thing felt like she was just setting out to prove that she is a better author than Stephanie Meyer (as are most people) and that HER books werent about Team Boy A and Team Boy B.
I almost never like a movie better than its original book, but I am just hoping that they give [name of boy redacted to prevent spoilers] a better send-off than the freaking book did. All series long it was boy, boy, boy, boy and then BAM he just goes away? Not cool.
Lord of the Flies is one of your least favorite books? I read it in one sitting in 8th grade (hiding the book when my mother walked by because I was SUPPOSED to be doing math homework) and proceeded to write a trivia game about it (my first computer program that did more than just say “hello world” or “I can count: 1234567890″). Oh and I thought Ralph was hot (not Balthazar Getty from the movie, which I didn’t see til later, but the Ralph that formed in my mind reading the book). I guess you could say I was a pretty big fan of that book.
I suddenly felt the need to come back and piece together two thoughts from my comment that were more distant that I’d have liked them to be upon rereading: I thought Ralph was hot when I read the book in 8th grade. I can’t imagine any writing now that would leave me imagining a 12-13 year old boy as “hot.”
You can rest assured that I understood you to be speaking of your 8th grade self.
I should also add that I sympathized almost too much with Piggy. My eyesight is such a vulnerability for me, and when the other tribe hunts him for his glasses…I threw up the first time I read it, it bothered me so.
Oooh, that reminded me that I also used LOTF as the basis for a photography assignment in college (“shoot a series of photographs based on a work of literature”). I did one photo representing each of the main characters. Piggy included a pair of broken eye glasses which is how your comment made me think of it. I need to track those photos down as I actually had them hung in my dorm room and townhouse immediately following college. I was quite proud of that particular series.
It’s just too dark and grim and hopeless for me. I cant read it without feeling utter despair.
Ooooh…. I loved The Wire. Would to God I could tell stories that well.
Just watched “A Thief” on Hulu and enjoyed it. Six episode mini-series. Well done. Shame it got cancelled.
K – I run a weekly Bible study and occasionally preach sermons/cover services at the church I attend, but a fiction novel isn’t a sermon. I agree it is the absolutely wrong place to sling heavy-handed homilies.
Best,
Patrick
I shoukd have said that I dislike preaching in any LITERARY circumstance, as Ive always been quite a fan of actual sermons. In church.
Hmm, do I need to apologize? I definitely liked the first best, and the second the next best, but really enjoyed the series overall. Also, I get that how things wrapped up and how people turned out maybe wasn’t how people wanted them to, but they happened in a way that made sense to me as likely/possible.
Ha! No, no need to apologise at all. On balance i enjoyed the first two books enough that Im glad I read them. I was just so astonished with the third book–honestly, that was my first reaction. Because while I could see that it would be POSSIBLE for all the characters and plot threads to resolve that wya it seemed to be the most angry, misanthropic direction to go.
I’ll undoubtedly read the first book again, and perhaps the second. So it WAS a good thing you and Megan got me to read them. I just like to pretend that book three never happened, in terms of story.
But as I think of it from a writer’s perspective it was a very valuable lesson in terms of craft. So even that has its merits. Youre in the clear, dear. ;-p
Hey stranger.
Read the The Huger Games and its sequels, and after about a week, I realized, hey, I bet Coble read this, and I bet she’s posted on it. Glad I was right.
Never have I read a series where the first two books were so good, and the third book so bad. In fact, let my clarify, and say the last half of the last book, and let me use another word… unsatisfying.
I’m going to get into plot spoilers, but, just for the record SPOILER ALERT DO NOT READ ON IF YOU WANT TO KNOW HOW THE DANG THING ENDS!!!
A completely happy ending would have been false. Characters were going to be damaged. Yet I have never come across such a sloppy mess. It’s like Collins was going for tradgefy, and ended up with a grim farce.
O look, it’s Prim. Let’s burn Prim alive in front of Katniss fifty pages before the trilogy ends. You know, Prim, the person who Katniss volunteered in place of for the games in the first place, and got the whole story rolling. And there’s no build up, she’s just shows up, coincidently right infront of her sister, a 14 year old girl part of the initial wave of invaders, who gets to die a, and I’m quoting from the book, “human torch,” right in front of her sister.
And Katniss is horribly burned, Peeta is horribly burned, Gale is shot twice but lives (we find out in one sentence), she heals, confronts Snow, finds out Coin’s treachery, assasinates a freaking president (Coin), is tried for it (which we dont get to see any of) have Gale just disappear on her, moves back to district 12, and sorta kinda falls in wth living with Peeta… all in what… maybe 50 pages.
Good grief, I’ve just finished the damn trilogy, and I still haven’t gotten over that Prim’s dead, let alone the rest, half of which is simply summarized after the fact.
It was like in college when writing a paper and you realize that you only have to write one more page before you fulfill the length requirement so you just cram the rest of what you were going to say on the last page and end it.
Too bad Collins wasted how many chapters on a pointless chase through the sewers that had no bearing on the actual plot, (really, look back on it, no bearing at all) except to get people killed off like a second rate Stephen King gallery of horrors. Heat rays! Mutant monsters!
And Peeta isn’t even really in the third book, just the part of him that is… ugh… “hijacked.” Can’t develop a character when he’s chemically brainwashed for the entire book.
And the first two books were so good. They really were. I’m an experienced reader, and I hadn’t “bought in” into a series like this since imagining myself on horseback on the great plains with the Riders of Rohan letting myself get absolutley lost in the Lord of the Rings.
I think she was trying to avoid selling out, having signed the deal for the movies and working on the screenplay for the first one, and really overcorrected in the other direction. Hard.
Yes I’m still pissed.
(PS: Hope you and the regulars who comment here are doing well.)
It’s LEE!!! Good to see you, Lee!
And yes, your analysis of that last “book” is spot-on. That’s a great articulation of what bothered me, the whole sort of “let me burn all these bridges as quickly, inelegently and bitterly as I possibly can.” I never expected that the series would end happily, because it wasn’t ever a happy series to begin with. But there is a huge difference between a not-happy ending and a mean, sloppy ending.
As far as I know most of the commenters you know from past days here are okay, although there aren’t as many comments now that I have strayed from the political.
People don’t seem as eager to fight with me about the merits of novels.
Imagine that.
I, too, knew you’d read and commented on these, so having just finished the third one Saturday night, I wanted to come back and see what you’d said.
I really liked the first one, was a little less enthusiastic about the second one, and in the third one…I knew things were going wrong when I [SPOILER] breathed a sigh of relief when Katniss got shot.
No, a daisies-and-puppies ending would not have worked; neither, though, did I think a pubescent grand guignol worked. At all.
But, as is often the case, you’ve already said much better what I was thinking, so I’ll leave it at that.
P.S. I have an M.A. in English. I hate Jane Austen.
everybody is saying how theyve been waiting for your review and ever since you wrote this very opionated review people agree with you well i dont.I say you have no idea what you are talking about Collins changed the third story because it needed changed she didnt change it to say ““eff you, war is hell/suck it up” she wote it that way because a war had to happen and because that is what was expected of katniss is to break down a few times everybody does espcially after having to kill people,innocent children she wrote it because its a GREAT ending to GREAT triology her fans would know that abviously you arent a fan your just a fool who thinks you know what your talking about!
Abviously.
Pardon the brevity and the typos. This was sent from my iPhone.
well pardon my being rude but i still say that you have no idea what you are talking about Collins is brillitant!
Abviously brillitant.
Pardon the brevity and the typos. This was sent from my iPhone.
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