Here There Be Books (BL)

This review was originally posted at Birdbrain(ed) Book Blog on April 2, 2012. I put off reading the Hunger Games trilogy for YEARS, mainly because I’m one of those people who want to read a book in opposite proportion to how many other people love it. Everyone went NUTS over this series from the get-go, and for some reason that meant I didn’t want to read it. It’s almost like if I didn’t discover a thing first, I didn’t want to know about it! Which is hilarious, because usually when I DO finally read the thing I didn’t want to read because it was “too popular,” I end up loving it. So.The Hunger Games wasn’t, however, AS GOOD as I was expecting it to be. Well, how could it? Anything that’s hyped that much and salivated over by, like, freaking EVERYONE just can’t be as good as it’s been built up to be. It’s impossible!Even though it wasn’t as fantastic as I assumed it’d be, it was still pretty darned good. It took me a while to get into it– the beginning is kinda slow, and the sentences have a weird rhythm that kept throwing me off. I also found myself very hostile towards the Peeta-Katniss romance because I didn’t think it was all that romantic that Katniss was forced to be in love with Peeta AND Peeta himself was very annoying, what with his “oh I’ve loved you for forever but I never said” and “You do love me back even though it should be kind of obvious that you don’t because of how Haymitch said to play to the sponsors and you’re too busy running for your life and everything to think of romance.” HOW HARD IS IT TO SAY SOMETHING, PEETA. OF COURSE SHE’S PLAYING TO THE CAMERAS, PEETA. Holy cheese did that piss me off. I didn’t trust him, either; he could so easily have been faking it as well and thus deliberately playing with Katniss’ emotions, and that’s not a cool thing for a romantic hero to do. On the other hand, Katniss isn’t the most reliable of narrators, and so he COULD have been legit after all.By the end of the book I was actually really pissed off, and it took me a while to calm down enough to want to read the next book in the series. Actually, and this is kind of funny, but I read some non-spoilery reviews for Catching Fir that said it wasn’t the best book in the series, and that made me want to read it more than anything else. lol, right?So, what did I like? I liked the dystopian world. You don’t get a whole heap of details of what it’s like to live in Panem (although what you DO get is infodumped every two pages and it’s almost always horrifying), but it was enough to interest me and keep me reading. I LOVED the classical Roman/GReek references, most of which were rather cleverly referenced. I also really liked Katniss, for all that her POV was annoying.I liked that she wasn’t just a stereotypical “strong female character.” Yes, she uses weapons and kicks butt, but she does it in a way that stays true to her original personality. She doesn’t suddenly become Action Katniss, Now with Guns. She’s still Katniss-from-the-block, and that shows even after she kills people and sees others killed. I especially liked that she was vulnerable and had trouble figuring things out,4 but that she didn’t let that or her emotional instability from keeping her from surviving/saving Peeta. She’s as realistic as a dystopian heroine could be, and always in a way that made me want to root for her. Yay Katniss!It’s not a perfect book by any means, but I can see why people love it so much. And now that I’m (as of writing this review) halfway through the third book, I can see why people were so obsessed with the series as a whole. It’s got romance and action and thriller-y things, and of course the dystopian elements are always fun! Maybe the writing is a bit annoying, depending on your tastes, but it’s good enough to have made me want to read the rest of the series. That’s a pretty tough accomplishment, I think.If you’ve put off reading The Hunger Games for whatever reason, I think I can safely say that– if you’re interested in the genre, at least– you’ll enjoy reading it. I don’t think that it’s the sort of book that’ll make people who only read political non-fiction books love it, for instance, but anyone who likes YA or dystopias or even romance would.