I took a trip up to my sister-in-law's cabin this weekend. Since all vacations require a good book to read, I decided to pack along Suzanne Collins's chart-topping book The Hunger Games. Maybe you've heard of it.
I think I may have needed to take a second book with me, because I breezed through The Hunger Games in about twenty-four hours. It's a pretty good read.
Like most YA writers (with maybe a few exceptions), I don't find myself impressed so much with the quality of Collins's writing as much as with the quality of the story. The Hunger Games is a brilliant story - tense and action-packed with a real sense of relevance.
One caveat - although Collins's writing isn't exactly world-shatteringly good, her descriptions of FOOD were, in my evaluation, excellent. I got hungry every time Katniss did, and, for a book called The HUNGER Games, that seemed a fitting response.
Now for the inevitable comparison to the movie - I'm honestly not sure which I liked more. Like most books adapted for movies, I found myself a little distressed at some of the material the filmmakers chose to leave out. I knew NOTHING about Avoxes (Avoci? How do you pluralize that?) from the movie, and I appreciated the additional fleshing out certain characters get. As a result of the added time the book spends on the characters, I found Effie Trinket FAR less annoying, and I really liked District 11's Thresh a lot more.
That said, I don't think the book is entirely superior to the movie. I was genuinely bugged (at least, until I got swept up in the story) by the first-person narration in the book. At first, I was simply bothered by the fact that I had no idea who Katniss would possibly be writing this story TOO. Was it her journal? Her "Katniss's Log," if you will?
Stardate 46209.13.
The perspective of the book, though, is a nit too nitty to really pick, except for one major difference between the film and the book: the clarity of the story. See, in The Hunger Games: The Novel, everything is spelled out, because we can read everything going on in her head. While that perspective does help flesh out the world in a lot of ways, I found I actually missed the ambiguity of the film, where Katniss's motivations were a little more obscured.
So it comes down to whether the audience wants a fully-realized world or a more ambiguous heroine. Ultimately, I prefer the latter, but I'd still whole-heartedly recommend The Hunger Games to fans of the movie.
Oh, and I found the book far less self-contained than the movie, with plot threads left dangling for the inevitable sequel. Heck, it even ends with the line "End of Book 1." I guess it's now inevitable that I'll be picking up Catching Fire at some point.
2 comments:
First Person Present Tense* And yes, that bugged me too, to the point of not wanting to bother after chapter 2.
Oh man, I am super curious to see what you'll think of the next two in the series. I quite liked the first one myself, but I HATED the third one.
Oh, and I laughed out loud when you talked about her food descriptions. That's something I would have said!
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