Oh Susan Collins, let me count the reasons why I want to punch thee. While I think she had an awesome idea for the Hunger Game Series, I cannot for the life of me figure out why she decided to squander her efforts. The concept is great - children fighting to the death to honor the district from where they came. It features a main female character, Katniss, who is strong willed, not afraid to admit her faults and is accountable for her actions. The backdrop is a post apocalyptic United States, and it is being controlled by a nearly totalitarian government, and Katniss is the key to bringing it all down. Think all of this sounds cool? Yeah?
Well guess what. It's lamesauce. Why, do you ask?
Because it's just another Twilightesque novel where the main female character is basically completely driven by her desires for boys/men. I completely despair over this. Katniss has so many opportunities to do so many wonderful things but yet she is often preoccupied with her friend Gale and Peeta, the boy who fell in love with her for no apparent reason at all. I was hoping that Katniss would kind of grow up in this installment, and while she does in some sense, for the most part she is still the loopy teenage girl who is a slave to her hormones.
I'm not saying that romance or love shouldn't be a part of literature for young readers. That isn't the case. Many of us have learned a lot from our relationships and in some ways it makes us who we are. I object to the unhealthy relationships that are presented in a lot of young adult novels. Love should not hurt. Love should not make you feel as though your life is in danger. Your boyfriend or girlfriend should not look to you to tell them who they are. You shouldn't play games with people's emotions. All of these things are kind of at play here. I actually found myself shaking the book at certain points because it was so frustrating for me to read these things and think about the audience consuming it.
I do like that Katniss, although completely unwillingly, does become a symbol of hope to people who are completely despondent. My only problem with this is that she is absolutely manipulated the entire time by the leaders of the revolution. She bends to their will at almost every turn. Even when she thinks she's tricking them, she isn't; everyone already knows what she's going to do before she does it. I also don't like that she almost never has consequences for her actions. She is driven by her anger to the point where it becomes self-destructive. She is irrational and selfish. At the end of the book, I found myself not really caring what happened to her - the death knell for any main character.
The two main male characters aren't all that great either. Gale and Peeta are both pretty bad examples of men and how they should be. Gale does everything for Katniss and willingly puts up with her abuse because he loves and cares about her. Peeta is the same way in a sense, but he's much more sensitive than Gale. So basically Katniss uses and abuses them as she sees fit because she knows they will both come crawling back to her. Really? Is this appropriate in any sense?
Another thing I took issue with was the absolutely over the top emotional reactions to nearly everything. It was annoying by the time I reached the end. There was also an undercurrent of suicide throughout the entire series, which I thought was highly inappropriate. Oh, life isn't going your way? Why don't you just kill yourself? Absolutely unacceptable.
I read an interview where Collins said that her whole idea behind the book was reality television, and how everything is cut and manipulated to look like something it might not be. She also said that she wanted to show how we are experiencing life differently because of television. I thought this was a cool place for her to write from. I also understand that her audience is a bunch of kids who are going through a lot of physical, emotional and psychological changes and that they love to read this kind of stuff. I just think that she could have done the relationship thing in a different way.
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