This review was originally written and posted in September 2012.

Yes, that’s right, the Hunger Games.  I’ve had a few requests for this one ever since I mentioned that I didn’t like the books.  And, well, frankly, I have been wanting to take a stab at them.  I know THG has a lot of fans, so for those who don’t care to see them critiqued, there’s two other reviews running at the same time for your reading pleasure.

There’s really not much I can say about Hunger Games that hasn’t been said by Farla, so I’ll be covering a lot of repeat ground.  This’ll be an abbreviated read-through, because I think most people are familiar enough with the plot that I can skip straight to the problems and not have to summarize too much.

In sleep, my mother looks younger, still worn but not so beaten-down. … My mother was very beautiful once, too. Or so they tell me.

This is our first introduction to Katniss’s mother.  Mom is asleep, and every bit of consideration is given to how she looks.  Specifically, to the fact that she’s no longer pretty.  Out of all the things you could say about this character, the book decides to introduce her with the ‘tragic’ fact that…she’s no longer pretty.  Why do we care?  Would her story have less pathos if she started out plain looking?  If a woman loses her husband and sinks into depression, well that’s a little sad, but omg, she used to be pretty and now isn’t!?!?!?!  Oh, that makes her tragedy much more clear now!  I couldn’t tell from the widowhood and crushing grief, but the loss of physical beauty makes it so obvious!

If you can’t tell, Mom’s treatment pisses me off throughout this trilogy, up to and including the fact that I have to call her ‘Mom’ because she’s never given a name.  Not once.  Not even in any supplemental material.  She’s not important enough for a name.  She’s just a set piece there to give Katniss one more hardship to whinge about.

Then there’s Buttercup, who Katniss wanted to kill because he was one more mouth to feed.  Frankly, the idea of feeding pets is a first-world thing.  It’s the attitude of a middle-class girl with too much food.  Why?  Because cats have been kept by the poor for centuries, by people who have no food to spare for their kids, much less a pet.  They’re kept because they catch their own food.  Indeed, a few lines later, Katniss notes that he’s good at hunting mice.  This is basically the whole reason cats are domesticated.  Mice spread disease and spoil food.  Having a cat to keep the mice at bay can be the difference between dying of the plague and living a few more years.  The fact that Katniss sees Buttercup’s mouse-hunting skills as a side-effect instead of as the main reason to have a cat is a big point of disconnect for me, especially since right after that she mentions that their food is kept under an upturned bowl to keep mice away from it.  If she’s aware that mice are a problem, why isn’t she aware that cats eat rodents?

I feed Buttercup the entrails. He has stopped hissing at me.

Entrails. No hissing. This is the closest we will ever come to love.

That’s some pretty big love, considering entrails are densely packed with calories and nutrients, and also you’re supposedly starving.

a deterrent to the predators that live in the woods—packs of wild dogs, lone cougars, bears

Apex predators are rare.  It’s because they are meat-eaters, and frankly, meat is not very efficient.  You have to eat a lot of it to survive on that alone.  You can’t have a whole bunch of carnivores in one area, because they would run out of food very fast.  Plus, cougars and bears wouldn’t come into a densely populated town, because that’s just not how they work.  They avoid humans unless they are on the verge of starving, and at that point, there’s only going to be a few of them anyway.  Dogs would be a bigger problem, but you can hunt those to thin out the pack.  Even dogs would rather hunt things that don’t hunt back, so as long as the pack is small enough, they’ll stay out of towns.

Also, bears are omnivores.  They have plenty of other options if the meat is scarce.

Also also, the fence is apparently enough to keep out these packs of wild dogs, but she can get under the fence easily.  No.  Dogs can get through just about anything, especially shoddy fences.  My last dog was exceptionally good at escaping through gaps that I couldn’t even see.  If we assume that they would want to come into the town, a fence with a gaping hole in it isn’t going to do jack-shit to stop them.

As soon as I’m in the trees, I retrieve a bow and sheath of arrows from a hollow log.

Here’s the thing about wooden bows.  They require constant maintenance.  If you don’t keep that wood well-oiled, it’ll dry out, and then it’ll crack as soon as you pull the string.  Bows require elasticity to work, and wood has this tendency to dry out as soon as it’s dead.  This is a bow her dad made, more than five years ago, and when she’s not hunting with it she leaves it out in a log.  That thing should be useless by now.

But there’s also food if you know how to find it. My father knew and he taught me some

Even while dead, her father is more useful than her mother.

Even though trespassing in the woods is illegal and poaching carries the severest of penalties

Why is poaching illegal?  For the lulz.  The reason there’s so many laws around hunting right now is that animals are in danger of being hunted to extinction.  Even if they aren’t endangered, if enough are hunted in a small area, it can wipe them out locally and then fuck over the regional ecology.  That’s not a concern here.  District 12 is the only bastion of human life for at least a few hundred miles in every direction.  It makes no sense to say they can’t hunt in the woods, or at least forage and gather firewood.  If there’s no fence around the District…so what?  Is the Capitol worried they’re going to escape?  To where?  All the other towns are Capitol-controlled, and if they tried to set up a free town in the woods, the Capitol can bomb the shit out of it.  At best, you’d lose a few people here and there to go be hermits, but those people are going to escape through the holey fence anyway, so it doesn’t make a difference.

So, there’s no reason to have the people restricted to the town, except to prevent them from assisting in their own survival.  Which means they end up frozen and half-starved, ill and weak, and apparently the Capitol doesn’t realize that weak people are pretty shit at mining.  Really, if your industry requires coal to run, why would you not want to maximize your coal-harvesting abilities?  Plus, keeping the people from feeding and heating themselves means that the Capitol has to waste resources on that, which is also terribly inefficient.

Oh, and I could go on forever about the idea of having a District like this dedicated to coal mining.  How much coal is being produced by a single seam?  How long have they been there?  Do they move the whole District when the seam runs out?  Those things aren’t endless.  With modern techniques, you’d get maybe a hundred years out of a big one, less if you go all-out.  And since this is the entire country’s sole source of energy, they’d have to go all-out just to keep up with demands. 

Okay, back to the actual story now.

My father could have made good money selling them, but if the officials found out he would have been publicly executed for inciting a rebellion. Most of the Peacekeepers turn a blind eye to the few of us who hunt because they’re as hungry for fresh meat as anybody is.

If the Peacekeepers are desperate for fresh meat, why would they punish someone for making more hunters, and thus more available meat?

It’s for the lulz.  This book couldn’t be bothered to make a real, sensical, efficient totalitarian state, so it just throws in a bunch of scary shit and assumes no one will notice the duct tape.  The officials are scary because they will murderkill you, but the situation is also so shitty that even the officials are in the same boat.  That makes no sense.  If the Peacekeepers are just as shat upon by this society, then it makes no sense that they would help perpetuate it.  Either they are given some comfort advantages by the state, or they are in the same boat as civilians and willing to break laws for the sake of not fucking starving to death, and this book can’t decide which one is true, so it tries to mash both options together.

In the fall, a few brave souls sneak into the woods to harvest apples.

Apples don’t grow true to seed.  They have to be grafted, and they take a lot of care and maintenance.  Now, this could be a leftover orchard…except no it can’t.  Apple trees only live 80-100 years, and they only produce fruit for 30-40 years.  This society is more than 75 years old, so that orchard should be fruitless by now unless someone is going in to graft new trees.  And also to clear-cut the forest so that said apple trees have room to grow, since they tend to be quite short and can’t compete in the wild.

I mutter. Then I glance quickly over my shoulder. Even here, even in the middle of nowhere, you worry someone might overhear you.

If you’re worried that someone will hear you, then don’t talk to yourself.

The fact that Katniss is unconcerned enough to make the slip means she’s not really that worried.  If she was raised in a state that punishes every little slip, then she would have the “don’t talk out loud” habit hammered into her.  It wouldn’t be a thing that she needs to remember, it would be a thing that doesn’t even occur to her.  Katniss isn’t some modern-day girl who’s used to the freedom of speaking her mind and has to remember to keep quiet.  She should have to remember that “oh, yeah, out in the woods and no one can hear.”  This is totally backwards.

Even at home, where I am less pleasant, I avoid discussing tricky topics. Like the reaping, or food shortages, or the Hunger Games. Prim might begin to repeat my words and then where would we be?

1) You get nervous talking in the woods, but you’ll be “less pleasant” at home?  Are you worried that the Capitol has bugged the trees but not bothered with your house?

2) If these attitudes are learned, where did you learn them from?  Katniss here is worried that Prim will pick up ideas from her, but not that Prim will form them on her own.  Because, apparently, Prim isn’t as super-special as Katniss and can’t think for herself.  Because Prim is a girly-girl and not an honorary boy like Katniss is.

A thicket of berry bushes protects it from unwanted eyes.

Because it’s not like berry bushes evolved to specifically say “LOOK OVER HERE AND EAT ME” or anything like that…  Seriously, if the only reason people go into the woods is for food, why would you hide right next to the food?

“Hey, Catnip,” says Gale.

This nickname is never repeated ever again.  Not even by Gale.  Why does it exist?  It serves no purpose.

crazy lynx started following me around the woods looking for handouts

You were worried about rabies a few pages ago, but crazy animals give you no pause?  Also, lynxes are not carrion eaters.  They would not ‘look for handouts’ or try to eat another hunter’s kill.

Besides, the Capitol accent is so affected, almost anything sounds funny in it.

To ‘affect’ an accent means to fake it.  If the Capitol people are speaking in a Capitol accent, then it’s not faked, it’s an actual accent.  Also, the Capitol produces the only news or television broadcast, and they have all the power.  It should be the standard accent.  People can still deride it simply because they’re looking for any way to lash out, but it shouldn’t be considered ‘fake’ sounding.

Then again, this book doesn’t have the best track record in that area.  As we’ll see later, the whole “fake=bad and bad=fake” idea gets hammed in with a brick.

He could be my brother. Straight black hair, olive skin, we even have the same gray eyes. But we’re not related, at least not closely. Most of the families who work the mines resemble one another this way.

If everyone has the same coloring, then no one is going to count on coloring for familial identification.  Personal story time: when I was learning Korean, we learned all of the specific words and phrases they have for describing a different person.  Since “she had black hair” is a meaningless descriptor, they use things like “she had a triangle-face.”  People pick up on differences and use those for identification.  If everyone in the seam has black hair, then Katniss shouldn’t even consider black hair as a unique trait.  She should be saying “me and Gale have the same straight nose and square chin, but we’re not related.”  Or, you know, whatever the similarities are.  Actually, we don’t know what these two look like outside of coloring.

She must have really loved him to leave her home for the Seam.

Because it’s just unfathomable that Katniss’s father could have left his home to go work in his new wife’s apothecary.  Nope, that’s not a thing that happens, women always have to go to the men, even if it means a step down for everyone.  Because this book is feminist, didn’t you hear?

And if there’s such a call for apothecaries, and if times are so dire for everyone, why didn’t both parents work?

It would be bad enough if there was some sort of law surrounding this, like in The Selection, but here it’s just left there to hang on its own.  We’re presented with the idea like it’s assumed and natural, as if no one could ever conceive of a way to do things differently.

I try to forgive her for my father’s sake.

Forgiving her for her own sake is also unacceptable.  The world revolves around men, dontchaknow.

And you may as well throw in our mothers, too, because how would they live without us?

Yes, how could two grown women ever possibly function without a boy and a stand-in-boy to take care of them.  I mean, it’s not like they’re adults or anything.  They’re widows and everyone knows that widows are just the most pathetic creatures ever.  The idea of them being self-sufficient is just inconceivable!

game has to be swapped for lard or shoelaces or wool

You’ll buy already-made-shoelaces, but not already-woven-fabric?

The fact that they don’t leave makes no sense.  They are clearly better able to survive in the woods than they are in town.  Katniss goes on several times about how ‘teeming with life’ the place is.  They act as if it would be just the two of them supporting a bunch of useless family members, but why?  The older kids can learn to hunt, the moms can learn to hunt, the younger kids can forage.  There’s no reason not to put all the kids to work.  In fact, there’s no reason not to do that now.  They’re starving, but Gale can’t bring along a little brother, point him at a berry bush, and say “pick all the berries while I go shoot squirrels”?  Hell, even the trading idea doesn’t make any sense.  If there’s things they need that they can’t get from the forest…so?  They already sneak out to hunt, what’s the difference if they do it backward and sneak in to trade?  They could make weekly trips to the black market to pick up man-made essentials. 

It makes me jealous but not for the reason people would think. Good hunting partners are hard to find.

And once Gale is married or dating…he can’t hunt with you anymore?  I mean, it’s not like he’ll suddenly be distracted from hunting by the new woman in his life.  This isn’t a hobby, it’s his method of survival.

I found the [strawberry] patch a few years ago, but Gale had the idea to string mesh nets around it to keep out the animals.

Because the menz is the smart ones.

We easily trade six of the fish for good bread,

Eat the fucking fish.  They’re full of fats that you need, whereas yeasty bread is mostly hot air.  Bread is usually a staple because grains are easier to get than meat, not because they are better than fish.

She’s the only one who can consistently be counted on to buy wild dog. We don’t hunt them on purpose, but if you’re attacked and you take out a dog or two, well, meat is meat.

Why don’t you hunt wild dogs?  Meat is meat, and hunting the dogs means there’s fewer of them to wander around town and attack people.  And if everyone is starving, why won’t they eat wild dogs?  Once you reach starvation level, people stop being even the tiniest bit picky.

No one in the Seam would turn up their nose at a good leg of wild dog, but the Peacekeepers who come to the Hob can afford to be a little choosier.

Wait.  So.  People will eat the wild dog…they just won’t buy it?

Nothing about this book and food makes the least bit of sense.  Katniss is not a starving child who is the product of her environment.  She’s another middle-class-brat who sticks out like a sore thumb in her own world. 

I kind of get where the idea from this comes from.  If you make a main character too different from the audience, there’s less for that audience to identify with.  However, I hate that excuse!  I mean, there’s plenty else that people could latch onto (assuming it had been portrayed correctly): her fear of the Games, her love for her sister, her desire to survive.  There’s no reason to make everything middle-class.  And we have enough problems in this society with people being unable to empathize.  We need more books where people are made uncomfortable, where the reader is actually presented with a way of life and a way of thinking different from their own.  Especially young readers.  They need that kind of exposure, or else they grow up thinking that everyone is essentially a middle-class-kid like they are, and that turns downright disastrous when they grow up and attempt to make humanitarian aid plans.  This book is just reinforcing the idea that different ways of living, different priorities and different values and different thought processes, all that just doesn’t exist.  That’s not a message we want our kids to walk away with.

Being the mayor’s daughter, you’d expect her to be a snob, but she’s all right.

She’s a woman and she has money.  Look, everyone!  Be shocked at the fact that she’s not a bitch!  I mean, she lives in the same shithell as everyone else, but the idea that a woman could actually develop empathy for the people around her and not be terrible…well, who knew a thing could even happen!

“What can you have? Five entries? I had six when I was just twelve years old.”

“That’s not her fault,” I say.

“No, it’s no one’s fault. Just the way it is,” says Gale.

Uh, what?  ‘No one’s fault’?  It’s the Capitol’s fault!  The Games are not a natural system.  This didn’t get handed down from on high.  This is totally someone’s fault, you idiot.

And now to the tesserae.  A year’s supply of grain and oil.  Without said grain and oil, they would all die of starvation.  Or at least, that’s the implication.  So why is this grain/oil mix not a staple in their diet?  It’s mentioned repeatedly, but it’s never eaten.  Instead, Katniss eats meat and veggies that she finds in the woods, or trades meat for bakery bread.  She makes herself three times more vulnerable to the Games, but for a food product that she never fucking eats.

And it’s a poor risk.  If she gets reaped, then her family loses her tesserae and the food she brings in from hunting.  Suddenly they are without their supposedly-primary food source and their actual primary food source, leaving them with shit-all to eat.  The odds of the whole family surviving are greatly increased if she doesn’t put her name in extra times, because Katniss-as-hunter is more valuable than Katniss-as-grain-bait.

And don’t even get started on how easy this system is to game.  I mean, what’s to stop everyone from putting their names in?  If every person puts their names into the bowl the maximum number of times, then the statistics haven’t changed.  If your name is in the lotto 1 time out of 10 or 10 times out of 100, you still have a 10% chance of getting picked.  Then everyone would have more food, but without any associated increase in risk.  And if that’s allowed to be the case, then why doesn’t the Capitol just fucking feed people and keep things at one entry per year?

To my surprise, my mother has laid out one of her own lovely dresses for me.

They’re starving, but Mom didn’t sell her extra dresses.  Because…?

“You look beautiful,” says Prim in a hushed voice.

“And nothing like myself,” I say.

Yeah.  Putting on a dress and braiding her hair has somehow changed the very structure of her appearance.  Because looks are important, girls.  People are going to judge you by them, so heaven forbid you wear any clothes that don’t advertise your true, tomboyish, rolling-in-mud personality.  It’s not like you can have one look for hunting and one look for dressing up and be the same person in both outfits.  You’re only allowed one facet; you can’t be a multi-leveled and complete person. 

Because this book is feminist, and don’t you forget it.

I protect Prim in every way I can, but I’m powerless against the reaping.

Except for the power she has to volunteer.  Which is not some obscure, barely-remembered thing.  It’s mentioned every year.  Katniss knows, right here, in this scene, she knows that she can stand in for Prim if Prim gets called.  But that’s not enough pathos, so we’re going to go with powerless instead.

Attendance is mandatory unless you are on death’s door. This evening, officials will come around and check to see if this is the case. If not, you’ll be imprisoned.

And if you’re not home because you ran away to hide in the woods they…? ???????????????????????????????????????????????????  This seems like rather an important issue.  It would make more sense to say that they hunt down missing persons, not that they leave you be until evening and at that point simply come by the house.

The square’s surrounded by shops,

Who shops there?  The penniless seam workers who can’t even buy food?  The tiny population of merchants who…miraculously remain self-sufficient, even though they don’t produce anything or sell anything since there’s no one with coin to buy?

The reaping is a good opportunity for the Capitol to keep tabs on the population as well.

Are births not registered, then?  If Prim just never shows up and puts her name down the first time, will they know that she missed, or will she end up a ghost in the system?  If they know about her, show up at the house that evening, and Katniss says “Prim died of pneumonia when she was 10,” would there be any system in place to contradict her?  I mean, it’s not like they have hospitals full of medical records to verify or debunk this claim.

taking bets on the two kids whose names will be drawn. Odds are given on their ages, whether they’re Seam or merchant, if they will break down and weep.

What kind of betting is this?  The kids will be older and from the seam, simply because statistically, that demographic has more chance of being called.  Sure, you can take a long shot at a young merchant, but that’s not how gambling works.

See, people don’t gambol if they have no money.  Seems obvious, right?  So, the vast majority of people in this district can’t buy enough food to stay full, meaning they have no money to gambol with.  The bookies are going to have to go after the merchant class, who maybe have a bit of cash (somehow, even though there’s no market [economic, not physical] for them to sell their wares) to gambol with.  But long-shots only work if the bookie has the cash to make good if the long shot wins.  And that kind of cash pool only works if there’s a large base of betters putting money into it.

Most refuse dealing with the racketeers but carefully, carefully. These same people tend to be informers, and who hasn’t broken the law?

How do you carefully refuse an informer?  Just by not insulting them in the process?  In which case, actual law-breaking would be immaterial, because there’s this handy skill most humans have called lying.  If a snitch doesn’t like you, he’ll snitch on a made-up offense if he has to.  In a just, efficient system, most of these lies will get caught out, but in a corrupt system, people will get punished just on testimony alone.  It would be a lot more effective to say that people don’t want piss of snitches because then it’ll turn into a “he said, she said” battle, rather than to imply that they actually have a functioning justice system.

District 12’s population of about eight thousand

And yet they have a distinct worker/merchant divide, to the point where the two have different and distinct sets of genes.  Considering how many workers it takes to support one merchant shop, those merchants are probably terribly inbred by now.

He lists the disasters, the droughts, the storms, the fires, the encroaching seas that swallowed up so much of the land, the brutal war for what little sustenance remained.

ECOLOGY DOESN’T WORK LIKE THAT.  If the planet is fucked enough to actually wipe out huge swaths of livable land, then there wouldn’t be thriving forests on the remaining parts.  It would be more like “well, this scrabble of land occasionally grows corn, unlike that scrabble of land that never grows anything.”  Not “Well, this is verdant and fruitful, unlike that desert over there.”  Our ecosystems are far too intimately connected for a situation like that.

The more believable scenario would be that the infrastructure of civilization failed, but everything listed here is a natural disaster.  And with a lack of infrastructure, one would expect people to settle into small agrarian communities, not gather all together and stage a bloody war over the last train to nowhere.

The Treaty of Treason

You fail at names, book.

yearly reminder that the Dark Days must never be repeated, it gave us the Hunger Games.

You suck at oppression, too.  I just could never buy into the reasoning behind the games.  As a method of saying “fuck you,” they work.  As a method of saying, “obey us or else,” they suck.  After all, obedience gets you nothing but more dead kids (and starvation, and bullshit, and evil-for-the-lulz), whereas revolution gets you not more dead kids.

If anything, the games are just a yearly reminder that the Capitol sucks and needs to be crushed.  Which…indeed, they are, since in later books we find out that’s all anyone gets from them.  People revolt because the Capitol sucks and needs to be crushed.  The only reason it took so long is because they wanted to be smart about it on the second go.  Is this book seriously trying to tell me that no one saw this coming 75 years ago?  “We’ll just give them too little food to survive and then murderkill their kids on public television.  That won’t incite another rebellion.”

Honestly, the whole thing could have worked if it had instead been a case of the Capitol simply wanting murder-tainment and figuring the districts were either too weak or disposable, so any rebellion because of it wouldn’t be a serious threat.

the Capitol’s way of reminding us how totally we are at their mercy. How little chance we would stand of surviving another rebellion.

Nope, I don’t see it.  The ability to lock up 24 kids is not the same as the ability to lock up an entire country and keep them from burning shit down.  People should be (and indeed, are) watching this and thinking “I’m going to murder those motherfuckers right back” not “oh, shit, they might put me in a big arena, too!”  In fact…the districts are all enclosed and no one is allowed to leave them.  They practically are in arenas already.  So nothing can get any worse for the citizens.  What do they have to lose?

A hint to any future totalitarian rulers: don’t taunt the people who have nothing left to lose.  There’s nothing to stop them from making a suicide run at you.

“Look how we take your children and sacrifice them and there’s nothing you can do. If you lift a finger, we will destroy every last one of you. Just as we did in District Thirteen.”

The Capitol produces nothing.  They are pure consumerism.  They are not going to destroy their own infrastructure in order to flip the bird to people.  If they do that, it means they have no means of support anymore.  Anyone will an ounce of brain power would realize this and use it against the Capitol.

The problem with all of this is that it’s backwards.  The Capitol is powerless because they depend on the districts for everything.  The districts, on the other hand, get zero support from the Capitol.  They don’t need the Capitol.  If the Capitol suddenly fell into a black hole, the districts would work around it and be fine.  So, in fact, there’s plenty the districts can do, but there’s nothing the Capitol can do.  This whole ‘message’ is an illusion that only works because the population is apparently fatally stupid.

Since all of this is being televised, right now District 12 is the laughingstock of Panem

Haha, look at the mentally traumatized victim who now lives a life of PTSD horror that has to self-medicate with alcoholism.  Let’s all laugh at him.  Because, clearly, he’s the only victor to react to his situation this way, and none of the other districts have similar stories that they can use as a point of empathy.  Nope, it’s only Haymich, and that’s why even the other victims are laughing at him. 

Also, you know, 24 kids are totally about to be murdered, but the whole fucking country is going to ignore that for a second to laugh at the drunk.  And also, 24 kids are totally about to be murdered, but we should focus on being embarrassed because our resident trauma-victim is being a resident trauma-victim.  OMG, you guys, that’s just so mortifying. 

although everyone knows she’s just aching to get bumped up to a better district where they have proper victors, not drunks who molest you in front of the entire nation.

Yeah, that bitch.  How dare she want to not get molested?  Let’s mock her for the rest of the series.  Uhg, can you believe that woman and her…desire for personal safety?

As reapings go, this one at least has a slight entertainment factor.

It’s amusing to watch women get abused, as long as they are fakey-fakers who are fakes and also ask for it.  Because abuse isn’t reprehensible in and of itself, no, its morality is entirely dependent on the victim.  It’s only abuse if good people are hurt by it.

Because this book is feminist, and don’t you forget it.