The Hunger Games

Converse about your favorite literature and reading in this study.

The Hunger Games

Postby Aeroprism » Sat Feb 14, '15, 3:39 pm

I just finished reading the trilogy. I wanted to discuss it here, let's try to keep as spoiler-free as possible.

So there we are. Another hyped series of book that everyone and their sister assured me I HAD to read. Did it live up to the hype? Not quite.

Don't get me wrong, those were good books. Well, not all of them, but it was a good story as a whole, except for the end. I thought that the first book was very, very well done. I lost many hours of sleep, reading into the late hours of the night, wondering how things would turn out. I can say I completely enjoyed the first book and I should have stopped there.

The second book is essentially the same as the first book but with 300% more girlishness and half the content. You can't be surprised by a plot that was already used in the first book. Still, I kinda enjoyed it because I was looking forward to see how the whole story would turn out.

Then came the third and vastly disappointing book. The first half is slow and tedious, as if the author suddenly decided that her main characters had to acquire some sort of training and experience on "being normal humans like everyone else" before she could throw them into a story that quickly moved toward a point where it strangled itself and could not go on unless the author gave the heroine some magical powers. The political intrigue quickly became entirely too convoluted for my taste and the tacky happy epilogue felt expedited and wrong.

Well, it's a story and everyone can write what they like. Right? Why is Ms Collins acclaimed as a world class author that transcends time, I have no idea. I found her conversations to be confusing, especially during the second half of the second book. She also seems to enjoy writing a level of cruelty that rivals's GRRM's Game of Thrones. Some people may be into that but this eventually annoys me. We get it, the bad guys are bad. However, the main thing that annoyed me was that she (the author) was a one trick pony. This is her one and only literary device:

"So things were starting to look up when suddenly A TERRIBLE THING HAPPENED! And then we recovered a bit and things were not so bad when ANOTHER (possibly even more) TERRIBLE THING HAPPENED!"

She did that and nothing else. In the first book, it kept me hooked because the first hunger games were more or less appropriate to such a writing device. The second book had me go "Again? Really?" quite a few times. By the third book, catastrophes felt so clockwork, events felt so cheated that I had completely lost any remaining interest for the survival of any character whatsoever. I only wanted to know how the story ended and the ending was lame.
User avatar
Aeroprism
Numan
Numan
 
Posts: 1631
Joined: June 2010
Achievements: 95
Gender: Male

Return to Leapin' Library

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 0 guests