The Hunger Games Trilogy

The Hunger Games (trilogy) Catching Fire, and Mockingjay

By Suzanne Collins

Scholastic Press

I’ll start out with a great big WOW! This series is what YA Lit is all about for me. The books are exciting, smart, not-predictable, humorous, engaging, brutal, romantic, breathtaking, tragic and triumphant, all rolled into one.

The premise is not that far-fetched, actually. Picture a future United States that has collapsed into a world of drought, war and famine. We’ve been renamed Panem and have been divided into a Capitol and 12 districts. The leaders at the Capitol have developed a sort of a sick competition/entertainment between the districts in which a yearly competition pits two youth from each district to have a televised fight to the death, until only one of the competitors survive. The whole thing is televised with state-of-the-art cameras that can zoom into even the most remote locations.

This is not a World Wrestling Federation competition or a gladiator-style fight where they are all placed in a round arena to go at it. These battles take place in the wilderness where competitors can hide, plot, ambush and form alliances. To make it even trickier, the Capitol has the technological abilities to create artificial conditions, animals, insects and similar plagues to either help or harm the fighters. This all makes for an extraordinary plotline that is an exciting, tense and engrossing.

Congratulations to Collins for creating Katniss, an amazing and powerful female lead character. Readers will easily identify with the heroine and root for her through all three volumes of this engrossing series. Librarians…get your teens hooked on this series as soon as possible as there is a major motion picture in the works. Don’t forget to stock up on plenty of copies for your library shelves because the Hunger Games books will soon become even more popular than they are now.