I’m not quite sure why, but I felt the need to reread The Hunger Games (dystopian/science fiction, 374 pages) by Suzanne Collins and I was surprised that I’d never done a book review.

“In the ruins of a place once known as North America lies the nation of Panem, a shining Capitol surrounded by twelve outlying districts. The Capitol is harsh and cruel and keeps the districts in line by forcing them all to send one boy and one girl between the ages of twelve and eighteen to participate in the annual Hunger Games, a fight to the death on live TV. Sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen, who lives alone with her mother and younger sister, regards it as a death sentence when she steps forward to take her sister’s place in the Games. But Katniss has been close to dead before – and survival, for her, is second nature. Without really meaning to, she becomes a contender. But if she is to win, she will have to start making choices that weigh survival against humanity and life against love.”

THIS IS NOT A SPOILER FREE REVIEW

I don’t remember if I read the books first or watched the movies first, but I am one of those people who knows you always treat books and movies or television shows as completely separate entities that just happen to share the same name. I remember when the movies came out, though, and how the media around the movies was exactly what the books used as social commentary – that you have a portion of the population who only sees what they are supposed to see and develop a severe disconnect with reality. In this instance, I remember catching small snippets of television spots where the sole focus of the commenters was on the love triangle with Katniss, Peeta, and Gale. In the books, there isn’t any love triangle at all. Katniss is sixteen and has spent her entire life so far struggling not just to survive, but to ensure the survival of her sister and mother, as well. She is absolutely focused on not just her own survival, but how she survives so that Prim and her mother back in District 12 don’t receive any backlash from her own highly-scrutinized actions and words. Katniss knows everything she says and does is watched and controlled and that any mistake could harm them and this makes her very self-contained.

And yet, all anyone in the media could talk about was the potential romantic interests. “What do you think, are you Team Gale or Team Peeta?” as though Katniss herself wasn’t just a teenage girl involved in a struggle to survive the worst conditions imaginable. But the media people here in our real world were just like the people in the Capitol – so far removed from real life that the only thing they can focus on is the superficial. And I also think it’s a demonstration of one of the most toxic parts of our society, where we force romance, and by extension sex, on girls as soon as their gender is identified before even their birth. But that’s another rant on sexism and misogyny all by itself.

My point is when you are in a hostile survival situation, romance is the last thing on your mind.

During the Hunger Games themselves, Katniss uses Peeta’s media-announced feelings to help them both survive. Whether her feelings are genuine or not or which of the two boys in the book she romantically prefers isn’t the point at all. Feelings are complicated and she knew she needed to provide a good show to help both of them survive, and her internal conflict over the entire situation is well-portrayed throughout the entire book.

She also doesn’t want to kill anyone at all, even if she is going into the Hunger Games. She only directly causes two deaths, the first by killing the boy who killed Rue, and the second by killing Cato, which at that point was an act of mercy.

This brings up the question of who we are when we think everyone is watching and when we think no one is. When left on your own, starving and hunted, will you treat other humans as sport or try to help whoever you can with what you have? Peeta says it before they go into the Games about how he doesn’t want them to change who he is and he doesn’t change. He’s probably one of the smartest, kindest, most considerate people in the entire story. His goal is to make sure Katniss wins the Hunger Games and he does everything he can to ensure exactly that, even pretending to form an alliance with the Careers. But still, he takes no action to willingly or knowingly kill anyone else. He thinks of the future while Katniss lives only in the present, which you can’t blame her for because the amount of anxiety in daily life in Panem is crushing.

I think this book (and the series in general) is actually getting harder to read as the years go by and we all feel like things are getting decidedly worse and not better. The past described in Panem looks more and more like our own modern future right now. There’s even a sentence on page 18: “He lists the disasters, the droughts, the storms, the fires, the encroaching seas that swallowed up so much of the land, the brutal war for what little sustenance remained.” that really just hits so hard. All of those things are getting worse right now, as climate change starts to impact more of our lives and resources are already becoming more problematic, it’s not difficult at all to imagine the world described as Panem.

Overall, this book is a solid three on my rating scale. I’m glad I own it and it’s a really good story but it’s just getting so much harder to read these days because of the deteriorating situation in the world lately. This is a future that’s too easy to see and that’s not a good thing at all.

Collins, Suzanne. The Hunger Games. Scholastic Press, 2008.