The Hunger Games is a dystopia where children must kill each other to survive.
Do you know how, no matter how many deaths or how much weeping there is in Harry Potter, it’s still a beautiful story? Well, the Hunger Games Trilogy is a horrible, horrible story.
Here’s the gist of it: Katniss Everdeen (okay – just one moment – how cool is her name?!) lives in a country called Panem and is ruled by an evil dictator called President Snow. Her country is divided into 12 districts and the Capitol, where the President inhabits and orchestrates his orders from.
Because of the war that almost wrestled control from the Capitol 70 years ago and to remind the population of how their coup failed, the districts are forced to take place in the Hunger Games. Every year two children – a boy and a girl – from the ages 12 to 18 are picked from each district to go to an arena and fight each other to the death until only one of them survives and is crowned victor.
And when Katniss’s twelve-year-old sister Prim gets picked to go, Katniss has no choice but to volunteer to go in her place. This is where the story starts.
I could not put this book down. More than that, I felt sick every time Katniss or any of the other lovely but fierce characters were in danger.
I rarely like female protagonists because I always feel they’re either too silly and weak (ahem Bella Swan is pathetic) or when they try to be ‘fierce’ they just try to act like men. I don’t feel women have many characters to look up to.
But Suzanne Collins created the most perfect heroine of all time. Katniss is fierce, feminine, intelligent and tough. Without surrending the need for human company and love, Katniss manages to be independent and strong.
Peeta Mellark, the other 16-year-old from Katniss’s district to go to the Games, is also an amazing character. He also manages a powerful mix of traits; he is the nicest person in the book but he has a strong survival instinct. He had my heart from the very beginning.
The villain, President Snow, is possibly the creepiest bad guy I’ve ever read about. Besides killing children every year to make a point, he takes pleasure in mind fucking his enemies until they subside in the most cruel ways possible.
I am trying so hard not to give anything away, but you simply have to read it to understand it. The Hunger games is bloody, depressing and deceiving. And I absolutely loved it.
