Characters: B-
Writing: B-
Plot: B
Pacing: A
Poignancy: B
The many thousands of loyal readers of The Luxury Review may have noticed that it's been a long time since I posted a book review. Well, that's because it's been a while since I've been able to finish a book. Pretty sad, I know; I feel nightly remorse about this. These last few months, I guess I just had too much on my mind. Too much stress to detach from my own world and enter another. I couldn't get through anything — dense, intricately-written literary medications were just not appealing to me.
I guess that's exactly why books like The Hunger Games remain incredibly popular.
Usually I don't spend much time writing out a plot synopsis for the books I review. Here, I don't think I really could. The plot of The Hunger Games is literally Battle Royale. Haven't seen or read it? Well, here: Kids are drafted via lottery by the evil government, tossed into a giant playing field and forced to fight to the last-man-standing in a sort of reality TV brutal death game. Our heroine, the unfortunately named Katniss Everdeen, has to try not to die. Boom. It's straightforward. It's short and lean and uncomplicated. It is also, thankfully, riveting.
It would be tempting to say that writing a "young adult" book limits an author, since you can only get away with so much gore and sex and darkness and pain when you're writing for teenagers. But it works both ways, and I think Suzanne Collins made a smart, calculated choice when writing this series for a youngish audience. As a "regular" book, The Hunger Games would be accused of lacking complexity. There's never a sense that there's much out there, beyond the walls of the arena or the simple narrative. Granted, this is just the first book of a trilogy, a trilogy that was planned from the start, so maybe the scope opens up a bit with later installments. Regardless, it seems okay — it's obvious that Collins set out to write this book for a specific audience, so it never feels like she's just being lazy (I'm not saying teenagers all have short attention spans. Obviously, the latter Harry Potter books were gigantic, but books trying to break in to a younger audience are expected to be fast-paced, quick reads, regardless of their length.) Of course, writing a book this fast and lean and engaging takes skill too, just of a different sort than writing dense Pynchon-ian epics. You have to know what to cut, what to leave, and how to make the little material left in your streamlined plot as engaging as possible. Short and lean can still be boring, but not here. There isn't a dull moment or unnecessary page in this whole novel. As simple as the tale is, Collins knows how to tell it well.
So while I found The Hunger Games entertaining, even refreshing, it's not without its surprises. And it's certainly not without weaknesses. Despite what I just said about YA adults not getting away with as much complexity as "regular" novels, The Hunger Games does get surprisingly dark. This is a book about two dozen teenagers forced to brutally murder each other, after all, and Collins doesn't take easy outs even when she could. Some of the scenes in The Hunger Games are genuinely disturbing, despite the characters driving them lacking depth. In other ways, Collins does take the easy way out, tossing in a half-dozen deus ex machinas that she could have easily worked around. The nature of the game itself is sort of a DEM, since the Gamemasters can control everything and anything within the arena, apparently — they control the temperature, the weather, the food, the animals, the water, etc. And this is where the lack of depth in the world at large becomes problematic — when writing about an evil dystopian government, it helps to give them some context, some general clues as to the scope of their powers. Cameras film every move of everyone in this vast forested arena, but no character ever mentions seeing a camera, or any piece of technology at all. (I guess the cameras were some kind of omnipresent nanobot swarm or something.) And while there's suspense, the book remains fairly predictable. The surprises deal more with how than what, since the actions every character takes seem a bit pre-ordained by their generic types. In other words, Collins' choices as an author hold more surprises than any of her characters do.
Still, The Hunger Games is designed to not need context most of the time. It's kill or be killed, and everything is just solid enough to hold up that premise without cracking. Side characters are archetypal, and never have enough page-time to develop the quirks and habits that might make them truly believable. The world, too, is generic, but it's never the focus of the book, so it doesn't matter. Everything here is so focused on what does matter — survival, etc. — that there's no chance to look away, and no point when you'd ever want to.
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