Thursday, November 3, 2011

Literary Bite: Catching Fire and Mockingjay (of the Hunger Games Trilogy)

I strongly recommend that you have Mockingjay in your possession before you start Catching Fire. That way, when you finish Catching Fire at 2 am on a Wednesday (and your yoga alarm is going off in 4 hours and you’re exhausted from work but you still couldn’t even consider sleeping  until you read to the end), you can rest in the comfortable knowledge that the third book in the Hunger Games Trilogy awaits your voracious reading appetite instead of going into minor Hunger Games withdrawal for the week it takes to get the next book.


Just me?

You may recall that I read the first book, The Hunger Games, when I was in India. The series is best described as young adult dystopian fiction – don’t judge me, they’re awesome.

Books 2 and 3 are just what you’d expect – the same gut-wrenching, fast-paced, action-packed emotional rollercoaster that sucked readers into the first book of this super-popular new series.

You must read these books. This reviewer put it well: I’ll get the hyperbole out of the way first: if all young adult lit were as well-written as The Hunger Games, I might never read adult fiction again.


Agreed. 

Suzanne Collins does a great job of creating real characters. They live in a world like ours, but also distinctly unlike ours (it’s North America, but many many many years in the future). Despite the totally different setting, I really felt myself in each character. As I read, I wondered how I would react in the situations these characters are put in... (Full disclosure - it gets a teeny tiny bit teen angst-y at some points, but not annoyingly so.)

The second and third books are definitely darker than the first, and at times can be really creepy...but once you start you cannot stop!

And if you need another reason to read these books, there’s a movie coming out this November and I am SO PSYCHED. The character posters look just like I imagined them, and you can watch the trailer here.