Rambling Thoughts: "The Hunger Games" by Suzanne Collins

This was originally written as a post on The Book Club Forum, simply to go through my thoughts on the first book of the Hunger Games trilogy. This was written when I was about 7 chapters into the second book, Catching Fire, whilst tired and without any regard for structure. There are big spoilers for the book, too. If you have any answers for my randomly placed questions then please comment and let me know what you thought.

Can't help but say I was kind of underwhelmed by The Hunger Games. I enjoyed the stuff at the beginning. The first chapter made me fall in love with the book with how I came to understand the entire world within such a short period of time, and as it went on I was enjoying myself. I have to admit I was starting to get a bit bored with how everything was dragging out before the actual Hunger Games but I knew I'd get Battle Royale-esque escapades coming up.

And then the Hunger Games started and I just found everything a bit dull. Everything happened far too quickly, with too much bad stuff happening to Katniss within a few chapters. It started getting ridiculous the amount of times she had stuff flying at her.

It seemed that Collins tried getting all of the horrible things out of the way to build up a bland (possible) romance with some bland guy, creating a bland love triangle which appears out of place, especially at the beginning of Catching Fire. The love stuff is just so out of place, in my eyes, and ruins the strong character of Katniss and the pacing of the book. But Collins seems to have some issue with pacing, going from super speedy to boringly.

Regardless, I did kind of enjoy it, but I found it so dull at times. I was constantly wishing for things to happen.

One of the things I think that could have been improved is a bit more focus on the action. I didn't really feel the tension as most of the time she was on her own. Keep more people alive, have more encounters, increase the dread. Instead I was just thinking "Yeah, she'll be fine!" which, in a book like this, should not be what I am thinking. I should be wanting her to be fine against all odds. Instead, she has fire thrown at her and is poisoned but comes out all OK!

The lack of threat could have been due to the fact that we didn't spend much time with other characters. Cato never seemed to be enough of a threat, just kind of there looking for her and not doing much. Thresh was nothing, Foxface had a couple of cameos, the Careers... existed, I guess, and everyone else didn't matter. Deaths had no real impact. This, of course, comes from the fact that the book is written in first person, which meant Katniss couldn’t see everything else. But if maybe we heard about what awful things happened then maybe I could care more.

Thresh’s death seemed to cheat us of a good fight scene as it was done off screen. Did it take its toll on Cato? Did Thresh fight valiantly? Was he overcome with rage? What happened?!

And the ending was all kind of... what? I mean... what? What was with the muttations? I hope they get explained later in the books, because that bit seemed to completely jump the shark. Not that anyone questioned it, really.

Though, it’s not like anyone questioned anything. So often I thought Katniss would ask questions, to find things out (mostly asking Peeta why the hell he was with the Careers) but nope. She doesn’t. Instead she just blindly goes along with everything in ignorance, not even caring to wonder after Collins is done with that bit of the book.

Oh, and am I the only one who thinks Rue didn’t get enough time in the book for us to form an emotional attachment to her? She was just there one minute, then she was gone.

But yeah, those are my rambling thoughts on it. No editing done there, bar spoilers, to really make this make sense, but hopefully it does. So tired, so it probably reads horribly. Like I said, I still enjoyed the book, I just have a lot of issues with the latter parts of the book.