The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins **

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


I am definitely not the audience for YA and listening to The Hunger Games reinforced that notion for me. In a Big Way. It wasn't made any easier to have a narrator with a sing-songy reading pattern that about drove me nutz (since we were in a car listening to it on CD, this is a sort of pun).

We tried to finish it before arriving at the Xmas lodge in North Carolina where our hosts' adult children had suggested we have a discussion of it. All of them seemed to have been enthralled by it; of the 4 of us in the car, 2 felt it wasn't good, 1 thought it was OK, and the 4th was prepared to listen to the entire trilogy. In fact, the 3 of them said I was too picky about narrators - HAH! as if! - because they didn't notice the boring reading until I pointed it out.

When one of the characters that I felt invested in was offed, I turned to another audio book and left them to deal with the gruesome, futuristic/Mad Max plot where children are made to kill each other for food as a spectator sport. What I did hear - the beginning and the ending - reinforced my feeling that there's too much teen angst and playing out of pre-teen fantasies in YA for me to get interested. Then there's that MESSAGE thing - I don't need no stinking message.

A good writer can take any plot device, any characters, and involve me in the journey - I think. Maybe if Linda Howard or Suzanne Brockmann or Diana Gabaldon wrote YA, I'd like it. But so far, Twilight and The Hunger Games has left me wanting something else.

I didn't hate it so I'm going with 2 stars.