The Hunger Games

[Niels Olson]

Has anyone read these books? I have no interest in the movies, but I
have a 10 yo who might get caught up in the frenzy. I'm horrified by
Collins' salacious use of child-killing, but I also want to inquire
into the moral of the story: is it that human societies are capable of
horrible things and young people can contribute to the solutions? If
so, what does it say about the author that she chose as her setting
children killing children for sport?

[Michael Sims]

I have only read the first book. There is not much moral. It's just
The Running Man, the Schwarzenegger movie, with children. There is no
upside - here's the entire plot:

-- there is a bad society
-- heroine is noble and tries to save her family from pervasive hunger
-- heroine gets picked to die - there is no reason for the Games given
except entertainment
-- heroine gets brief glimpse of central society, which lives well off
the backs of the peons
-- heroine fights in Games and kills all the other teenagers

The end. There's no moral except perhaps, and only because I'm
reading it in, that sometimes societies are exploitative. The heroine
doesn't study or regret her actions or anything like that, no more
than Arnold Schwarzenegger did. Nor does the heroine rebel in any
real sense against the society, though perhaps that is coming in the
other books.

--
Michael Sims

[Eric Kidd]

Again, I've only read the first book, which puts me at a bit of a disadvantage here. The heroine lives in a subjugated and exploited "district" of what used to be the United States, and she's survived some pretty grinding poverty. She hunts illegally to put food on the table, and to provide a meager income for her mother and younger sister.

Her younger sister gets drafted to participate in a nasty public spectacle, something that the ancient Romans would have loved. The heroine volunteers to take her little sister's place, and gets whisked off to the capital and trained to fight. In the games, she has to find food, survive, and be the last kid standing.

The heroine does kill a couple of the other contestants, but she does so indirectly (by dropping a poisonous wasp nest among them, for example), and  the people she kills are pretty scary. So unlike Schwarzenegger in The Running Man, she's not snapping necks or wallowing in bloodlust. There are two non-sexual romances (though that could change in latter books), and the author is clearly setting up the heroine to fight the system—to whatever extent is actually possible. But in the first book, the heroine can only make small, symbolic gestures of defiance. She's a teenager in a brutal police state, her family is held hostage to her good behavior, and she needs to play along if she wants to survive. This is a book about trying to be a decent person in a bad society.

Basically, in terms of violence, it's a little closer to something like Terminator 2 than The Running Man—there are several ugly deaths, but the protagonists are trying to do the right thing on some level.

I would have no problem recommending this book to a high-school student. For a 10-year-old? Maybe, but you should definitely read it first, decide for yourself, and be prepared to discuss it with her. It's a really fast read, and I've definitely read worse.

Cheers,

Eric

[Chris]

Just read the book last night (it was about a four hour read for me).
Just for some additional background, the reason given for the games is
that 78 years in the past the districts tried to revolt against their
government and failed.

"Taking the kids from our districts, forcing them to kill one another
while we watch--this is the capitol's way of reminding us how totally
we are at their mercy ... to make it humiliating as well as torturous,
the Capitol requires us to treat the Hunger Games as a festivity..."

So there is a little more to the games than mere spectacle. The games
are a tool of oppression the government wields against it's citizens.