A review by cmhansen97
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

challenging medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

2.5

I hope enough time has passed for me to be able to say this. The Hunger Games is not a bad book, but it is a strange one to me. The writing is not particularly flashy nor will you be wowed by the prose of the text. The story itself is middling. It was part of (and in no small part drove to mass popularity) the craze of dystopian fiction (mostly YA) that entered literature in the mid-2000s, and as a result contains a lot of the same notes that you will find in books like Maze Runner, or Divergent. One of the big problems with this is it also comes with a rather shallow and nonsensical view of government and fascism in general, to the extent it is rather difficult for me to get into. The economy of the districts makes no real sense, the districts themselves are somewhat arbitrarily divided in ways that (again) don't make sense (why would your coal mining district, which would be of vital importance for energy production, also routinely suffer starvation??? sounds like a good way to lose power and therefore collapse your entire system of infrastructure). It is just evident it wasn't very thoroughly thought through, and this is also seen in the portrayal of the capitol, Panem, which is ultimately a poor man's stereotype of Neronian Rome. What is worse is the Games themselves don't really make sense... part of maintaining a stable empire would be ensuring some level of hegemony and a general sense of either prosperity or contentment among the populace. Fascism does, for sure, massacre and target groups, but these are usually hated minorities that the majority agrees should be targeted. So, I don't think the worldbuilding is good.

The characters in the book are also almost all pretty bland. Drunken mentor archetype (check). Well-meaning rich person (check). Main character who has very little actual personality (check). Family character we are meant to care for only because they are family, e.g., Prim, (check). This becomes a bigger problem in the final volume of the trilogy, but Prim is such an underdeveloped non-character I honestly don't feel attached to her, which isn't helped by the fact that Katniss is also very bland, so it hamstrings the whole inciting incident.

The one thing I will give this novel is that the action sequences and pacing are pretty good throughout, and I greatly appreciate that. It does make the novel a satisfying read, even if I find it to be a bit shallow.
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