The Hunger Games

[Will Brown]

Hello Everyone,
Welcome to the Falmouth Readers Book Club at the Falmouth
Memorial Library! We're know how hard it can be to make it to book
club meetings, especially with a busy summer ahead. We decided to
bring out book-club online for all of you because we wanted to make it
easy on you, so you can spend more time enjoying your summer and the
best stories we can find!
I wanted to start us off with a hot series, and I can't think of
anything that's caused more excitement than The Hunger Games lately.
This is an absolutely amazing story, and if you haven't read it yet,
be warned, there will be spoilers of surprises in the books in the
discussions ahead. Without getting into spoilers yet, I want to give
a quick feel for the story for those who haven't gotten a chance to
read it yet:

Life is hard in District Twelve; the coal mining district. It's
hard just to get enough food to fill your belly and people often go
hungry. Everyone who lives there has known people who starved to
death. Katniss Everdeen isn't the sort of girl to let her Mother or
Sister starve, so after her father died at a young age she took to
sneaking out of the city illegally and into the woods. There she does
something far more illegal.. She gets her hands on a weapon, a bow and
arrow, and hunts for game.
The only thing that keeps Katniss out of trouble is that the
Peacekeeper guards are just as hungry for the meat she brings back as
anyone else. But even her hunting isn't enough and Katniss, like many
of the teens of District Twelve has to put her name in to compete in
the Hunger Games. By doing so she earns food and oil to help keep her
family fed and warm, but once a year a boy and a girl are chosen from
each district to be tossed into a lethal arena, and all twenty-four of
them must fight until only one of them still survives. These are the
Hunger Games. They are the ruling Capitol's punishment to the
districts for a rebellion from a lifetime ago, they are also the
biggest and bloodiest entertainment on television. In the districts,
watching them is mandatory. Katniss is a strong, resourceful and fiery
girl, but this year is going to test everything she's got, because the
odds just aren't in her favor.

What did you like most about the Hunger Games? Was there anything
you didn't like, or that you thought was odd? Do you know any books
that you thought were similar? We'd love to hear about it all!