REVIEW: The Hunger Games trilogy

I’m trying to give up comic books.

Not cold turkey, but in the pursuit of literary productivity it’s one of the guilty pleasures I feel I must forego.  I returned a number of Marvel collections to the library, but I will admit a relapse while I was in the middle of the 3^rd book of the Hunger Games trilogy.  I breezed through the first one, reading the physical book and reading FAST.  The pacing was simply fantastic.  The second book was a bit larger, but flowed pretty well.  By the middle of the 3^rd, however, I had lost some level of interest - not entirely given up, but it didn’t hold me the same as the first book had.  So, I picked up the X-Necrosha graphic novel before finishing Mockingjay.  The X-Necrosha story involves the return of many deceased x-men and x-enemies.  Even with the comic book convention of labeling characters and their abilities (and in this case, their status as ‘deceased’) at the start of each issue, it was difficult to keep track of the many characters in this collection.  There were a lot of personalities to keep track of in Mockingjay, and some of them were as lost as I was.  What brought me back was the twist ending promised by other readers, including my wife.  Unfortunately, I was disappointed in two ways – the twist wasn’t severe enough, and the ending was otherwise pale.  It was a Stephen King-like Deus ex-machina, only the god in these works was a cruel god, to the reader and to the protagonist. 

Katniss was an authentic character.  I felt that her decisions and actions were genuine and real to her character as it was fashioned in the first book.  I liked how the romance played out through the books.  It wasn’t the main focus, but it drove Katniss in different directions, just as it would a ‘normal’ 16 year old girl.  My initial thought was that there was too little reaction to the many deaths in the series.   Early on, I justified this with the characters’ living conditions-they had watched the Hunger Games growing up, and life in the Districts was hard.  Later, however, as the deaths mounted, Katniss felt them hard, but other characters more or less brushed it off.  Perhaps this was because it was Katniss’s point of view, perhaps it was idle writing. What I did find fallacious was the entire premise of the Hunger Games themselves.  How could this oppressive government convince EVERYONE in Panem to sacrifice two children EVERY YEAR, for some 70 years?!  I just don’t buy that.  One of my first thoughts from that world’s perspective was REVOLUTION!, even before I was halfway through the first book.

There are many themes at play here, but none of them take the forefront, in my opinion.  Extreme poverty, government control, power, and corruption vie for the reader’s eyes, but it’s always Katniss and her limited perspective that the reader gets.  It’s the nature of the beast, but I wonder if a different point of view would have served the emotions of the story better, especially in the latter books.  What make the first story so likable are the raw emotions that Katniss goes through; the reader witnesses her struggle first hand.  The contiguous plot of the first story is missing in the 2^nd two books, especially the last, and the myriad themes get cluttered in the discursive narrative.

What I liked about the first book of the Hunger Games trilogy is what I like about comic books; direct plotting, uncomplicated narrative, and raw emotion.  What I found lacking in the third book is why I am trying to give up comic books; scattered narrative, too many characters, and disingenuous characterization.