The Hunger Games

From the back of the book: In a dark vision of the near future, a terrifying reality TV show is taking place. Twelve boys and twelve girls are forced to appear in a lve event called The Hunger Games. There is only one rule: kill or be killed. When sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen steps forward to take her younger sister's place in the games, she sees it as a death sentence. But Katniss has been close to death before. For her, survival is second nature.

Anyone who hasn't heard of The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins has been on holiday to the Moon for the last few years. When I was first starting to work in Publishing I was lucky enough to work for The Hunger Games' UK publisher and managed to get myself a copy of the first book. Being in the middle of my university English Lit course, however, I was swamped by a load of magical realism and post-colonial classics and never sat down and read it. Now, embarrassingly behind the rest of the world (even my mum has read it), I have finally opened it up to see just what all this fuss is about.

And it's good... it's really very good. The idea is one of those concepts that you just wish you came up with yourself. Reading that Suzanne Collins came up with The Hunger Games while flicking between a War documentary and a modern-day reality TV show, you can start to see why the book feels unnervingly possible. Admittedly it's a world we don't know but it's our world... just further down the line.

I'm not going to come out and say ahh the writing is amazingly sophisticated and beautifully done because it's not, but who cares when the plot is so compelling? There are plenty of successful books that are not written perfectly.

I wouldn't say any of the characters are 100% likeable but that's fine because you root for them and that's what really matters. No one wants a perfect protagonist because you end up disliking them for it!

This book has everything that any good story should have: excitement, fast pace, good characters, romance... I'm super excited to see the film (and Liam Hemsworth's arms) and can't wait to pick up the next 2 books!

6.5/10