The Giver

     In 1993, Lois Lowry had a book published titled The Giver (New York: Houghton Mifflin). It won the Newbery Medal, and seems to be generally credited with sparking the YA fiction trend in publishing, especially when it comes to dystopian future settings. Despite that, I enjoyed it, because it built so solidly off the work of Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451, George Orwell in 1984 and Aldous Huxley in Brave New World. 

     Jonas is eleven years old, and he has a sister named Lily. Each family unit in their Community has only two children as required by law, and everyone is color blind. There is no weather as we know it, nor hills or valleys. Music doesn't exist, and neither do emotions. There is no war, or hunger, or conflict. Instead, everything relies on Sameness, genetically-engineered conformity. (Though this doesn't always work out....some people have blue eyes, and his friend Fiona has red hair. "Life will find a way," as the characters in Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park and Lost World say.) He is looking forward to turning twelve, where the Elders will assign him the job he will work for the rest of his life.
     He is assigned to be the new Receiver; the person tasked with living with all the known memories of things that once were - battles(we see flashbacks of the Civil War), pain, love and happiness. The previous Receiver, who Jonas calls "The Giver," wishes to train someone new to take over this burden of handling the weight of the world's experiences. Through this training, he becomes able to comprehend concepts like hunting, war, starvation and anger. Also, through a glimpse of a family gathering at Christmas, love.
     This is a big problem, because his family unit has been taking care of an unnecessary baby named Gabe, who will soon have to be Released: killed by lethal injection and left alone to perish. And that can't happen. So Jonas and the Giver decide that he should escape; with the Giver staying behind to help the Community's citizens deal with the influx of memories that will wash over them once Jonas disappears. (The Giver knows this is needed because of the way the last Receiver-in-training reacted; she couldn't handle it and fell apart. The memories caused a large panic throughout the Community.)
     Jonas and Gabe escape into the strangeness that is Elsewhere; eventually coming to hills, seeing things like trees, and experiencing coldness and snow. The ending is ambiguous; either they escape to the safety of a little village, or they die of hypothermia like Hans Christian Andersen's Little Match Girl.

     There is a definite sense throughout the book that the current state of affairs is wrong, in some concrete, definable way. There isn't much detail given about how things got to this current state, but there is enough detail for the setting to feel believable. The third-person limited narration also feels authentic, and the tone is realistic, instead of being idealized like later dystopian-YA protagonists.  .

Old Yeller

     Old Yeller (1956), by Frank Gipson, is one of those tearjerker dog stories which would make life miserable if they didn't exist. It was a Newbery Honor book, and made into a movie by Disney the next year.

     This story takes place in the West Texas community of Salt Lick in the late 1860's, as best our narrator, Travis Coates, can remember. The men in the community decide to start a cattle drive to Abilene, six hundred miles north, in order to get some money. So fourteen-year-old Travis is left to take care of his mother and rock-throwing five-year-old brother, Little Arliss, as best he can until the men get back in fall. That goes well enough, until one day a very ugly dingy-yellowish dog with no tail and one ear steals the last bit of ham out of the smokehouse. Arliss adopts the dog, much to Travis's displeasure. And he also steals chicken eggs, according to Lisbeth Searcy, their pretty neighbor.
     However, Old Yeller scares off a pair of dueling bulls that threatened to smash up the Coates cabin, and then he saves Little Arliss from a wild bear. That endears Travis to both Yeller and Arliss, and from there on he discovers how smart and useful the dog can be. Which is why it's such a worry when a man comes along claiming that he owns Yeller. But on seeing how much Travis and Arliss love/need the dog - having been a boy himself, and likely with a boyhood dog of his own - the man (a bachelor) agrees to let them keep the dog in exchange for one of Mama's home-cooked meals. He also prominently foreshadows (without much subtlety) the oncoming plague of hydrophobia.
     Yeller then saves Travis from a group of angry wild hogs, getting all slashed to bits, and barely hanging on to life. Just when he's about healed, though, two cows get hydrophobia and have to be shot. (And burned, so the wolves and buzzards won't spread the infection.) Just after Mama and Lisbeth finish burning the second cow, they're attacked by a mad gray wolf, only to be saved by Yeller. After some time, Papa and the rest of the men come back from the cattle drive, and Lisbeth gives Travis a puppy, parents Yeller and her dog Miss Prissy(who was herself a puppy of Bell, the Coates' previous dog), and Travis decides to teach the puppy and Little Arliss how to hunt squirrels.

     Lots of people would consider this one a prime candidate for Saddest Ending Ever Written, but in my opinion Where the Red Fern Grows, by Wilson Rawls, is far worse(and by that I mean, while still horribly sad, much more worthwhile and beautiful). It's noble that Yeller dies protecting his family, and the tension of the hydrophobic cows is strong, but this just isn't that special a story. There is a lot of this-is-how-things-were-done-on-the-frontier-at-that-time description of hunting and trapping techniques, which some boys would likely love(like my brothers). I would have preferred more societal/historical details about the setting, if it were me. Travis is a frustrating narrator, because, no matter how responsible, the attitudes of most early teen boys are insufferable by nature(I'm sure I was, too). He was still easier to deal with than Katniss, though. I think it's because of the movie that this is considered such a classic.

#Wesley

Seabiscuit: An American Legend

     Great nonfiction is really hard to find. Off the top of my head, only Bob Greene, Michael Lewis and Laura Hillenbrand leap to mind as favorites in this area. Great biographies are even rarer, but Hillenbrand takes a wonderful story of three wildly-dissimilar men and the horse that intertwines their fates, telling it perfectly in Seabiscuit: An American Legend (New York: Ballantine, 2001). Be prepared for a thorough immersion in the fast-paced, adrenaline-packed world of horse racing.

     It started with the horseless carriage, really. An ambitious bicycle mechanic named Charles Howard began to tinker with these toys of the San Francisco rich whenever they broke down, and from there he talked his way into receiving a dealership. But who wants a motor-car when there are horses that will transport people just fine? That was the thinking, anyway, until the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906. Howard's machines were pressed into service as ambulances during the aftermath, and everyone began to realize the importance of these machines, and how useful they were for covering large stretches of ground quickly. As a result, more people bought cars, thanks to this growing realization and some snazzy PR by Howard, a born salesman if there ever was one. This made him one of the richest men on the West Coast. Being a rich man, he had dabbled in horse racing, since that's what wealthy people amuse themselves with(plus his friend Bing Crosby pestered him into it). In the mid-twenties his son Frank died in a horrific car wreck, which cooled his interest in cars a great deal. This hobby of horse racing - which he shared with his wife Marcela - was part of what helped him get over his depression. But the early horses were pretty awful. Until, that is, he met an Old West character called Silent Tom Smith.
     Smith was a horse trainer just as the Old West was fading, and then it was discovered that his talents could be used for making racers go faster, too; in addition to breaking mustangs for various cavalry, rodeo or stock outfits. That probably saved his life. The horses he trained were about the level of Howard's - meaning the bottom of the barrel, at claiming races in little out-of-the-way lawless racetracks. Claiming races are where there's a set price set for all horses before the race starts, and only the winner is safe. Anyone else can be bought by anybody. Sort of the pawn shop of the "sport of kings." But his horses started winning, and often. That led to better horses and more wins, which led to his meeting Howard and getting hired.
     Red Pollard was raised on the bush-league tracks, after being abandoned in Wyoming at one at the age of fourteen. He was eccentric for a jockey - he would quote Emerson and Whitman, or read Shakespeare all the time. Yet at the same time, he had an incredible grasp of the profane, so his talk was a weird hybrid of cultivation and vulgarity. So the reporters loved him, of course, because he usually always had a great quote or two they could use. And shortly after he was hired by Howard, a rock blinded him in his right eye, which he kept a secret from everyone, knowing that his jockey license would be suspended if it was known that he had basically zero depth perception.
     Smith had seen this funny-looking horse on the claiming-race circuit and thought he might be something special, considering that Sunny Jim Fitzsimmons, one of the foremost trainers in the world at that point, was training him, and that he was a descendant of Man o' War, one of the greatest racehorses in history. But Seasbiscuit(for that was his name) was lazy. So Fitzsimmons gave up on Seabiscuit, who then bounced around near the bottom of the barrel of the East Coast tracks, eventually was picked up by Howard after Smith spotted him again in a claiming race.

     It took several months to get the woefully underfed Seabiscuit into racing shape, both physically and mentally, but in late 1936 he finally began to show the promise of his bloodline. So he was sent off to San Francisco's Bay Meadows track to spend the winter, readying for the richest race in the world, the Los Angeles-area Santa Anita Handicap, which paid the winner $100,000(and this is during the end of the Depression, mind you.) Handicaps are races where the faster horses are assigned more weight to carry, in order to make things fairer, and also to encourage betting. Most of the big races outside of the Triple Crown, like the Breeder's Cup, are handicapped.
     The 1937 edition of "the hundred grander" took place with on February 27 with Seabiscuit pretty much a dark horse, as far the favorites went. He took on the favored contenders Rosemont and Special Agent, sailing into the lead on the backstretch...until he suddenly veered to the left, near the rail, killing his momentum and allowing Rosemont to come up beside him. The rail is the shortest way around the track, but also potentially the slowest, since the ground is usually worse down there. Seabiscuit loved to run along the rail whenever he could. But Rosemont crept up on his right side, leading to a photo finish....with the Howards' horse the second-place finisher. Maybe Pollard couldn't see Rosemont coming; because of his blind eye. But since he couldn't tell anyone that, he was left defenseless against the rousing onslaught of criticism which said he lost the race. That pretty much killed his reputation around the barn, adding to the conditions which made the Howard stable Pollard's only reliable source of rides.
     The press invasion had begun, because America needed a hero, and the media determined that that hero was a scrawny Thoroughbred who got the wrong end of one of the biggest races in the world. While establishing himself as the fastest horse on the West Coast, he became the top American news item of 1937, topping even FDR and Hitler. At the same time, Pollard's reputation was still taking a beating. To fend off the prowling hordes of photographers and reporters, Smith began practicing Seabiscuit in secret, and frequently substituting his nearly-identical brother Grog in photoshoots. War Admiral won the Triple Crown that year, and was by any measure the best horse in the country. But a growing percentage of people thought that Seabiscuit could give him a run for his money. A match race was tried to be agreed upon, but nothing happened due to the East Coast establishment attitude from War Admiral's owner Samuel Riddle. Meanwhile, the weights the handicappers were assigning for Seabiscuit were enormous; putting greater and greater strain on his body. The two titans were scheduled to face off in the Washington Handicap in November at Baltimore's Pimlico racetrack, but it was raining heavily on the day of the race. Seabiscuit was a terrible mud-runner, because he didn't like to get dirty, for one thing, and he couldn't get any traction with the way his short stubby legs galloped. So he was scratched, and War Admiral ran away with the victory. They were also scheduled to run in the Pimlico Special, but it rained again that day, and so Seabiscuit was scratched - again. And War Admiral won - again. But Smith thought he found a way to beat War Admiral, though, if they ever could meet....
     Seabiscuit, you see, hugely enjoyed tormenting whoever he was racing against. He liked to intimidate the other competitors, so much so that it was nearly impossible to find anyone else who was willing to work out with him, except for a filly named Fair Knightess. In the Pimlico Special, another horse had stared War Admiral straight in the eye, which freaked him out considerably.

     In December, the Howard crew headed back home to San Francisco, spending the winter at the Tanforan racetrack. Things didn't go well. On December 7, Pollard was riding the Howards' sprinter Exhibit when the horse swerved suddenly away from something, right into the path of another horse called Half Time, impeding his progress. It was very unlikely that the move was intentional; but perhaps erring on the side of safety, considering that horse racing had a very shaky reputation, the track stewards suspended Pollard for a month. This derailed Seabiscuit's preparation, for Howard said if Pollard wasn't riding him, he wasn't racing. Fair Knightess was also scratched in a Christmas Day race, for good measure. War Admiral was named the 1937 Horse of the Year by the sportswriters. Then Riddle pulled War Admiral out of the Santa Anita, racing him in Miami at Hialeah racetrack instead against significantly weaker competition. So Seabiscuit missed several races waiting for the new year of 1938 to appear, and thus Pollard's suspension to be lifted. In the meantime, everyone went stir-crazy - the reporters, the horse himself, Charles and Marcela, Pollard, Smith... And the hundred-grander kept inching closer and closer without a race, first because the track secretary issued Seabiscuit an astronomical 132-pound impost, which everyone flatly refused to accept. When the secretary finally relented with a 130-impost in the San Carlos Handicap on February 19, he was finally entered and set to run again.
     On the night of February 18, it started raining. So Seabiscuit was AGAIN scratched, but Fair Knightess was left in the field. Pollard was aboard the filly. She was running well - hanging in fourth most of the way - but up ahead of her an infamous horse called He Did sideswiped someone else, leading to a huge traffic jam that Fair Knightess plowed right into, with no way to slow down or swerve out of the way. She went down, with Pollard underneath her. Her hind legs were paralyzed; and Pollard's left side was utterly crushed. Both horse and rider hung uncertainly near death. A jockey named Sonny Workman was hired for ride Seabiscuit for the last prep race, but given conflicting instructions on how to ride him, he finished second in a dead heat at the wire. Smith forced Howard to fire him, which left them again without a jockey for the big race. Until, that is, Red's friend George Woolf (a much better jockey) pulled some strings to get out of his ride, and he explained in detail the way he would ride such a temperamental horse as Seabiscuit was. That convinced everyone; and so Woolf would ride Seabiscuit in the 1938 Santa Anita Handicap.

     It started out dismally. A goon riding a hopeless longshot called Count Atlas repeatedly smashed into Seabiscuit at the opening furlongs, deliberately delaying his progress. Woolf knew the lawless tricks of unscrupulous riders as well as Pollard did; they raced on the same cut-through-a-wheat-field bullrings at the start of their careers. Sometimes, you had to fight back just to survive. This was one of those times. Woolf smacked Count Atlas' rider in the butt with his whip, which gave him a clear hole to advance through. That left Seabiscuit in twelfth, eight lengths back, with a little over half the race to go. The only option was on the outside of the main pack. And the main competition were nearly identical brothers, Stagehand and Sceneshifter. Stagehand was the hotshot three-year-old, the pre-race favorite for the Kentucky Derby. Seabiscuit caught up with Sceneshifter and rocketed past, leading the field, until Stagehand(carrying only 100 pounds, due to a quirk of scheduling) blazed up alongside. The horses hit the finish line together; for the second year in a row, Seabiscuit was in a photo finish for the win. And for the second time, he lost. It took a while to determine that, though - and everyone in the Howard camp was crushed. So was the public, who wanted their hero to triumph.
     Pollard was able to start riding again in May, much to everyone's surprise. After much behind-the-scenes negotiating, a match race between Seabiscuit and War Admiral was finally set for Memorial Day at New York's Belmont racetrack. Everyone went crazy with excitement and anticipation, but both horses didn't do very well in practice leading up to the big race.At the last second, Seabiscuit had to be scratched because of soreness in his front tendons, much to Riddle's relief. In June, Pollard was working out a horse as a favor to a friend. The horse went berserk; crashing into a barn and shredding Pollard's leg to the bone.
     In July, with Woolf aboard, Seabiscuit won the Hollywood Park God Cup, defeating Ligaroti, the horse of Charles' friend Bing Crosby and Charles' son, Lin. A match race was arranged between them at San Diego's Del Mar track in August, and the press had a field day with it, promoting all the interesting angles - friends competing against each other, son against father, American horse versus an Argentine; Bing and Lin had even hired Smith's son Jimmy as their trainer. Seabiscuit won - barely - but there was a huge controversy that sprung up after the terrible brawling of Woolf and the other jockey. But that was eventually forgotten a couple months later, when in early October the news broke that the Pimlico Special, on November 1, would be run as the match race between War Admiral and Seabiscuit, for real this time.

     Woolf and Pollard talked strategy in the hospital, while Smith worked to improve Seabiscuit's reaction time out of the start. War Admiral's trainer worked on improving his horse's endurance. A vast, agitated throng swarmed into the track, despite the race date being a Tuesday. This race was being broadcast live across the airwaves by NBC, and almost everyone - including President Roosevelt - was listening intently. Forty million listeners was the estimated audience. The crowd at the track was so tightly-packed that Clem McCarthy, the announcer, couldn't reach the press box. So instead he leaned on a portion of outside railing and called the race from there.
     It was a thrilling race. They dueled neck-and-neck for quite some time before Seabiscuit's intimidation mode kicked in, and he sailed ahead to win by three lengths. The sportwriters finally named Seabiscuit the Horse of the Year.

     In a race at Santa Anita in early 1939, one of the prep races for the hundred-grander, Seabiscuit ruptured a suspensory ligament in his front left leg, putting his career in doubt. The Howards entered another horse from their stable, Kayak, in the Santa Anita Handicap, and the Argentine horse(bought in the same herd as Bing and Lin's Ligaroti) won the race. For most of 1939, Pollard and Seabiscuit recuperated on the Howards' ranch, slowly mending from the injuries to their bodies as the mental scars those injuries brought along were washed away.
     In January 1940, they returned to Santa Anita. The day of the race dawned on March 2, and all the other trainers were hoping that if their horse didn't win, that Seabiscuit would. It came down to Seabiscuit and Kayak; and for the last time, Seabiscuit found that extra reserve of acceleration. They finished one-two, and the public finally got the fairy-tale ending they were hoping for.

     In 1946, Woolf's diabetes caused him to faint in the middle of a race. He was thrown, and died instantly. Three years later, there was a statue of him erected in the Santa Anita infield.
     Smith faded into obscurity, despite winning the Kentiucky Derby in 1947 while working for an eccentric perfume baroness. He suffered a stroke at 78, and died several years afterward.
     Red got married to a nurse named Agnes in the spring of 1939, and he and his wife had several children. He kept riding until 1955, then he worked in various tasks around a track in Rhode Island so he could be near the horses he loved so. He died in 1981, Agnes followed two weeks later.
     Seabiscuit learned how to herd cattle in his retirement, and on May 17, 1947, he died of a heart attack at the age of fourteen. Howard's health was failing by then, he would die of heart failure three years afterward. Several fighter planes were named in Seabiscuit's honor, as was an ambulance for the British Red Cross. In 2003, there would be a movie made about him, with Tobey Maguire as Red Pollard.

     I apologize for the length and detail of this review, but such intricate reporting and thrilling phraseology merited a quick summarization of all the wonderful content in these 400 pages.

#Wesley

Mockingjay

     First, there were The Hunger Games. Next everything was Catching Fire  as the districts of Panem began to rebel against the Capitol. Now in Mockingjay (New York: Scholastic, 2010), it's all-our war.

     Before writing novels, Suzanne Collins began her career as a TV writer for shows like Little Bear and Clarissa Explains It All before becoming the head writer of Clifford's Puppy Days. So the elements of a good story are there, certainly. Because it's a war, the stakes are simple, and everyone understands wars, so it becomes easier to write about that having to create, then immerse, your readers into the world of the story. So Mockingjay lacks a lot of the tediously-recited snippets of backstory in favor of just telling the story. Because it's a YA novel, and the primary readership target is teenage girls, Katniss STILL worries a lot about the whole Peeta-Gale thing, which is tiresome, but that element has been shoved pretty far into the background. Instead, the role and power of the media during wartime is emphasized, which is a really overlooked, but very interesting, aspect to focus on. I like that.

     District 12 has been destroyed, but roughly eight hundred of their citizens were evacuated to District 13 to begin again. Katniss becomes the Mockingjay, a mascot for the rebels to promote unity throughout the districts, which eventually works. This is accomplished through propaganda short films broadcast through the nationwide TV network. Meanwhile the Capitol has been holding Peeta hostage until it was no longer necessary, using his well-known eloquence to try to halt the destruction. It doesn't work, and so they allow the rebels to recapture him. Reprogramming his mind from the Capitol brainwashing takes quite a while. Gale's hunting practice leads to him becoming one of the major rebel strategists; willing to go to extreme measures in order to win victories.
     On a TV shoot/mission deep in the Capitol itself, Katniss pulls yet another of her audibles and directs her squad to President Snow's mansion to assassinate him. Things go very bad very quickly, as they tend to do in combat zones, and most of the members of her group are killed. Bombs disguised as presents explode in the middle of a group of children, and then a bunch of rebel medics rush in to help. (Prim is part of this group, on her way to becoming a doctor.) Then a second collection of bombs rain down, killing the medics and just about everyone else, causing enough mayhem that the Capitol is taken over by the rebels.
     Katniss gets severely burned and goes into a deep depression over losing Prim, which makes sense, given how much she cared for her, and their mother's reaction to their father's death. President Snow has been jailed by rebel President Coin, awaiting execution by Katniss' hand since that was one of the terms for becoming the face of the rebellion. They run into each other, and Snow explains that if he could have, he would have simply escaped; that the bombing was planned by Coin. Katniss realizes that the strategy of using the medics as pawns was something Gale would plan, and that Coin is plotting to simply take over Snow's position, leaving much else about the government unchanged.
     At the last second during Snow's public execution, she shoots Coin instead. Snow commits suicide, Katniss tries to, and the government is in chaos, eventually putting itself relatively back together. She is judged insane, and thus freely acquitted of Coin's murder, and she is relocated back to the rebuilding District 12 with Haymitch to keep an eye on her.  But recovery takes a very long time. Eventually, things get better. She works with Peeta and Haymitch on writing a book to keep the memories alive of their friends who died in the war, and twenty years later she's married Peeta and they have two children, a son and daughter. Both still suffer from flashbacks, which the kids don't completely understand, but Katniss hopes that their generation will learn from the sacrifices hers made.

     During times of war, the rules are different. And so sometimes there isn't a right answer, as Captain America: Civil War has just shown moviegoers. Those decisions can leave large wounds in those involved, which take a long time to heal. Sometimes they don't, completely. But life goes on. Friends and allies can disappear, for one reason or another. The ending of this series is decidedly mixed, which I like, because it's realistic. Lots of people hate the ending for that reason, but isn't that part of what fiction is supposed to do? Paint as true a picture as possible, so that the audience will learn something from it? The ideas behind this series were great. The setting is engaging, and the plot interesting. But because of her choice of POV, particularly in narrator, almost all of those wonderful background details are overshadowed. Which is frustrating. This is my favorite of the trilogy by far, though. The pacing plods along often, particularly after the massive Prim-killing explosion, but that allows us to feel the weight of this conflict and the choices made on both sides. There's a lot to chew on, unlike the earlier two.

#Wesley

Catching Fire

     Once The Hunger Games were completed, they would come again next year....unfortunately. So Suzanne Collins' Catching Fire (New York: Scholastic, 2009) continues the story of Katniss, Peeta and the impending revolution. It doesn't get much better, since it's the middle act of a three-part series, it mainly sets up for the big conclusion at the end. We learn a bit more about Haymitch's backstory, which explains a lot, but he - and everyone else - are possibly even flatter and uninteresting this time around. The DRAWN-OUT love triangle continues, as Katniss deals with trying to decide whether she likes Peeta or Gale better. That is maddening. The pacing is all haywire, going on for two pages about various wedding dresses, then leaping over months of drawn-out agony for neighbors in District 12, passing over their worsening condition in another two pages. That's the first example I can think of. Overall, it plods along without much of anything interesting happening, and is a total waste of a lot of now-dead trees.

     So Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark won the 74th edition of the Capitol's Hunger Games last year. Along the way, Peeta confessed that he's loved her for basically forever, which they use as a strategy in order to survive in the arena. It worked, sure, but since in real life she can hardly stand him, that makes things awkward once they get back home to whatever "real life" is now that they're nationwide celebrities, and thus summoned for all sorts of TV specials, parades, feasts, etc. Katniss goes hunting, because that's what she does. When she can, she hunts with Gale, who has all the emotional capacity, not to mention character complexity, of a rock. President Snow comes personally to Katniss's house to inform her that the other districts were inspired to rebel by her decision at the Games, and threatens that she has to shut them up. (Would he really come personally to deliver that message? I mean, really?)
     On a Victory Tour around the districts, while visiting 11 Katniss and Peeta thank the people for Thresh and Rue's actions. In response to this, the audience makes a "thank-you" gesture they saw Katniss make on TV, which gets several people killed. Peeta and Katniss become engaged during a staged interview, but their efforts to douse the glowing embers doesn't take. Katniss does a whole lot of monotonous pondering over who she likes better. District 8 revolted, and Katniss figures out that District 13, thought to be eliminated generations before, still exists.
     Since the 75th Hunger Games needs to be extra awful in order to make it special, previous victors must return to the arena to fight again. For District 12, that means Katniss and Peeta. They (with some prodding from Haymitch and Effie) make friends with the District 3 tech whizzes and a District 4 guy named Finnick. Most of these competitors have secretly teamed up to make sure Peeta and Katniss stay alive, and enough of them last long enough that they can blow up the force field trapping everyone in the arena. People from District 13 save Katniss, but they can't get to Peeta in time. So in retaliation, the Capitol blows up almost all of District 12.

#Wesley

The Hunger Games

     One of the series that set the current trend of young-adult bestsellers, besides Harry Potter, was Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games trilogy. The first book, The Hunger Games (New York: Scholastic, 2008) is rather dreary and unpleasant, as all dystopian YA fiction must be. I think Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower must have influenced Collins a lot in writing these, which isn't saying much. (It's really rare when there is nothing whatsoever praiseworthy in a novel, but Parable of the Sower is one of that rare breed.) The ideas behind this series are good, at least; it is based heavily on Roman ideas of society and the Greek myth of Theseus.
     The idea apparently came while Collins was channel-surfing one day and stopped on a reality show for a few minutes, then stopped for a bit on coverage of the war in Iraq, and those two ideas began blending themselves together in such a potentially-interesting way that she had to see where it would lead. The premise is gruesome and extremely violent, but could have been interesting if she hadn't chosen a first-person, continuously present-tense POV.  And since the narrator is a poorly-educated 16-year-old girl, the grammar is horrible. And so it's awful to read, even though it does match the character. And it has all the pieces that seem like it would make it wonderful - there's an underdog, good battling evil, but the characters are extremely flat, and Katniss, our narrator, is insufferable, both perfect at everything and stunningly clueless. The plot is utterly predictable, too.

   Panem, which used to be North America a long time ago, is ruled by the Capitol, which is a city-state located somewhere around the Rockies. There are twelve Districts which are subservient to the Capitol, and in order to enforce their power, the Capitol holds an annual spectacle known as the Hunger Games, which takes twenty-four teenagers - two from each district, a guy and a girl - and forces them to fight for the death. Since everyone in the country is near the starving point due to some unexplained famine, the winner's district is showered with plenty and he or she becomes a celebrity. Also, these games are televised and it's mandatory to watch.
     So Katniss enjoys hunting. She's really good when it comes to archery, we're told up front. Her sister Prim gets selected as District 12's girl tribute, but Katniss volunteers to take her place. The other tribute is a guy named Peeta, who works as a baker and has a knack for painting. (He's also had a a crush on her since they were five, which is convenient.) They have to convince the only living District 12 victor, Haymitch, to coach them on how to survive. Eventually he agrees to, reluctantly.
     At the Capitol, Katniss's stylist Cinna makes her clothes into inflammatory political statements, which helps attract attention to her as Someone to Watch. (Because she's perfect, and Peeta's in love with her, and that makes a good story for TV. And somehow she hasn't realized this, which doesn't make sense.) Once they get to the arena, people die in lots of gruesome ways, and a whole lot of wasted characters reach their expiration point to the novel's plot, dropping out without explanation. There's a lengthy and awkward "nurse-him-back-to-health" scene, which doesn't fit, considering that Katniss didn't inherit any of her mother's talent for nursing. (This mother never even gets a name throughout the whole series, not even "Mom." But besides serving as a nurse, the only other memorable thing about her is that she suffers from immense depression, because there isn't enough bleakness in this setting, apparently?) Katniss becomes allies with a girl from District 11 named Rue, who reminds her of Prim. Rue is brutally murdered, which allows us to see a (completely unbelievable) tenderness from Katniss.
      Eventually, following an attack by wolves, it comes down to Peeta and Katniss agreeing to commit suicide together so that there is no victor this year. This panics the officials, called "Gamemakers," and they hastily crown them co-champions. Their injuries are repaired by the skillful Capitol surgeons, but their lives will never be the same, given their defiance of the arena's rules.

     Peeta would make a much better narrator, simply because he is naturally empathetic and skillful with using words. Cinna also would count as an interesting character if Collins had dove deeper into his motivation for his actions, but as merely the stylist, he gets shoved to the background very quickly. Third-person would have worked best, because the narration by Katniss quickly become very monotonous and very repetitive. So it's hard to care about anyone. The love triangle between Peeta, Katniss and her hunting partner Gale stretches out too long. And the ending just sets up future books, not really offering any closure by itself. I'm not a fan at all.

#Wesley