The Hunger Games – why I didn’t like it??

The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins. First read 1 October 2017.    2 // 5 stars.

Hi, it’s me, your controversial friend here to talk about her controversial opinion. Here’s why I didn’t like the Hunger Games. Let’s get started!

(obviously this is all just my opinion etc etc, if you disagree feel free to chat with me in the comments!)

I went into the book with the knowledge that I was very behind. I read it about a month ago, and The Hunger Games was really realLY big five years ago. Every bookworm who called themselves a bookworm had read this book, and I was rather behind! So I figured I might as well give it a try.

what it’s about

If you have no clue what the Hunger Games is about, it’s a story about some teenagers thrown into a giant arena and told to kill each other until there’s one left. There’s a love triangle, a grumpy main character, and a fairly predictable plot.

some thoughts

The first impression I had of this book was that I was surprised how popular it was. I personally didn’t enjoy it! Although I can see what the book was trying to do, I think it missed too many opportunities to put Katniss through difficult moral decisions to be called a Really Great Book™.

There’s a fair amount of info-dropping in the book. While this is necessary to a certain extent in fantasy and dystopian books, there is a right and wrong way to do it. Showing the reader information through dialogue and through action sequences is great! Giving the reader information by having the first person pov character think it, paragraphs and and paragraphs of it, is not so great!

So much of this book was made up of pages and pages of information that I had to take in to understand the plot. It just made me, as a reader, really tired?? And a little bored as well??

Another thing that I struggled with was the writing. I really didn’t like it. It felt forced, and there were so many places where I was internally fixing the grammar, or switching a sentence around, that it really became a distraction. (It also just proved to me how cool being an Editor would be. Hire me please!)

However, the main issue that I had with this book was the author’s decision to avoid putting Katniss in any difficult scenarios at all. Every time that there was an option to put her in a difficult situation – i.e. deciding whether or not to kill someone, or whether to kill someone or die herself – she was mercifully saved.

My point here is that this book could have been such a good psychological thriller! There could have been mysterious twists and turns. Katniss could have chosen to turn the other cheek and died for what she believed in. Peeta could have not been a jerk (I’m sorry – I really didn’t like him XD).

I just think that the author missed opportunities to make this book a really great one!

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Although there was a ton of things that I didn’t like about this book, there were a few things that I did appreciate!

• I really liked Rue?? I think she was well developed and really cool!
• The world building was decent! Although half of it was from info-dropping, I could really visualise the world that Katniss was running around in.

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Those were my thoughts on The Hunger Games! Honestly, the best part of this experience was debating with my friends about whether or not it’s a decent book.

What are your thoughts?

Keep smiling,

emmi 🙂