The Hunger Games

I picked this up mostly to see what all the fuss was about years after everyone else already had, and yeah, I get it, I read the whole thing in one sitting and only noticed my phone was dead when I finished. Collins knows exactly how to end a chapter on the worst possible beat to make you keep going, comma comma, it’s genuinely well constructed as a page-turner even if you already know the broad shape of where it’s headed.

The one thing that started to grate on me by the second half was how often the book reminds you Katniss is hungry or near starving. I get it, it’s called The Hunger Games, the deprivation is the whole point thematically, but there’s a point around the two-thirds mark where I felt like I was being told the same fact for the fourth time instead of shown something new about it. I can see the argument that the repetition is deliberate, reinforcing the atmosphere rather than just repeating itself lazily, and I’m somewhat convinced by that read even if it didn’t fully land for me in the moment.

The arena sequences are where the book is strongest, tense, fast, willing to kill someone off with almost no ceremony when the story needs it, which caught me off guard more than once in a good way. Katniss herself holds the whole thing together, she’s sharp and self-interested in a way that feels earned rather than written to be likable.

Four stars. Fast, mean when it needs to be, a little repetitive in the middle third.