Hunger Games Wrap

It’s a wrap! I sometimes hate to come to the ending of a book. It’s like the most perfect day you  could ever imagine, but then it’s midnight and you know it’s over. I’m glad this is one is over! Midnight couldn’t come fast enough. But, it was burning me to finish it. I probably should have chosen another book. This is the kind of book that is not easily forgotten. It’s haunting. It’s brutal. It’s riveting. In the beginning, it was so compelling, I couldn’t put it down. I had a love-hate relationship going on throughout. The futuristic gladiator thing isn’t my genre and neither is the whole theme of children killing children. I have to confess that it kept The Lord of the Flies flooding my mind, and I hate that book to the point of refusing to teach it the last time I taught sophomores. Instead, I opted to teach Fahrenheit 451 – another dystopian setting, yet much more agreeable than that of The Hunger Games.

While I understand the part of kill or be killed and I understand that rebelling is not an option in this society (or non-society), as a mother I cannot fathom just giving your child a hug and sending them to a death-fight in which they will most likely be killed. I hated the whole child killing child in the Lord of the Flies too. We strive to end bullying and to educate our students so that they can put an end to this, yet we encourage them to read and embrace books that idealize or rationalize the very thing that we strive to stamp out in real life.

On a positive note, the storyline is addicting. Normally, I would put such a book down and refuse to finish reading. This book demands to be finished. Collins creates characters so believable, you will root for them even though you hate what they are doing. You will find yourself thinking about them – constantly. Katniss, the main character, is a strong teenage female who sacrifices herself to save her sister from the game by going in her place. Other than that act, I found her to be totally self-centered until she beats the system by feigning the attempt to commit a suicide pact with Peeta in order to save him when the rules of the game change and the two from the same district are ordered to compete. Everyone knows she would have slaughtered him.

The fact that I completed this book, while hating it, attests to the quality of the writing, the believability of the characters, and ever driving quest to just get it finished to find out what happens in the end. I don’t think I will finish the trilogy.


Update: My "Older" YA Lit reading daughter just finished the series and thinks I'm "nuts" because I didn't care for this book. She cannot believe that I am not compelled to read the other two! Just not in it!

Publisher: Scholastic Press

(Trilogy Box Set)

ISBN-10: 0545265355

ISBN-13: 978-0545265355

Parallels with Present Day Society!

As I was conducting a search for a lesson on something entirely different, I was hanging out at teenreads.com and wandered into a reading groups site, kind of by accident. Because I suffer from ADD and stop to look at shiny things and all that glitters, I clicked on the guide for The Hunger Games. One of the questions just stopped me in the tracks of my keyboard. It was something like this - Since the beginning of TV, there have been reality shows like "Candid Camera" and the "Miss America Pageant," but today reality TV has morphed into competitive and survival type shows. "Discuss this phenomenon with respect to The Hunger Games. What other aspects of our popular culture do you see reflected in this story?"  

I am still reading this book, and so far, loving it! But oddly enough, I am NOT a reality TV fan. How can you not draw some parallels? Our society feeds on these reality shows! I watched the first season of "Survival" and have no desire to watch another. I loathe "Fear Factor!" I have only seen a couple of the shows, and none in their entirety, because I was not "seeing" the FEAR, I was seeing things that were disgusting. It's not fearsome to eat insects. It IS fearsome to be in the dark, or on the edge of a tall building, etc. if those are your fears. 

So anyone have any comments about the relationship between The Hunger Games and our modern reality TV shows? 

I can read it if I want to!

Finally, I have something to read! Actually, I have a whole lot to read, but not for this blog! I am reading two books for other classes. One is Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness, and the other is Translated Woman. Cocktail Hour is about a Scottish girl who grows up in Africa. Translated Woman is about a Jewish/Cuban anthropologist who goes to Mexico and takes Esperanza's story about being a woman, wife, mother, and daughter-in-law in Mexico and how it is not a Sunday school picnic.


Now, for the young adult literature I get to read! I admit that I have not read a great deal of YA lit lately, but that's because I have been taking grad classes which greatly occupy the majority of my time. I have watched my students for quite some time now traipse in and out of my classes with a book they just love, The Hunger Games. 


Divine providence! Last week, a copy of The Hunger Games just happened to get left in my classroom. I have no idea whose it is, where it came from, or how to return it as it is not a library book. I held it up for each of my classes for two days and nobody claimed it. So, I decided that it was meant to be. I will have to read this book.  


When I asked my student, Kayla, about the series, she sat right down on the floor next to my desk and gave me her "thumbs up" review! I didn't think I was going to be able to teach that day! Her enthusiasm was contagious. When I told her I wanted to read The Hunger Games, a comical thing happened. She exclaimed, "Ms. P., they are really books for teenagers!"


Pursuing the conversation, I asked her if she thought I would like the book, even though I am "old." Again, she insisted...."They're books for teenagers." 


Again, I told her I was interested and would just like to read the book to see why my students, and she especially, are so "into" this series. 


"Well, you will probably like it," she relented.


Finally, I was getting somewhere. I just felt like she thought she had to give me her approval before I could read it, because it was for teens!


I have started reading it, and while I am not in very far, I think I am going to love this book! I will let you know.......