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.  .

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