Reading up a storm

I’d been hearing about this book all summer. It had been getting a lot of attention from fellow librarians and when a friend of mine gave it a great review on Goodreads, I figured I should just read it. It came in for me at the library and another book If I Stay distracted me from The Hunger Games for about two days.

Katniss is 16 and lives in a district on the edge of the country of Panem. Panem is what’s left of the former North American continent after war and disasters. Each year the Hunger Games are held at the Capital. A boy and a girl from each other 12 districts are drawn to represent their district in the Hunger Games. Katniss steps in after her younger sister’s name is drawn.

She and the boy from District 12 are flown to the Capital and prepped for the Hunger Games, which are required viewing in Panem. Prior to the Games starting the Capital presents the participants as celebrities.

Then the Games start. It’s reality TV at its most gruesome and violent because everyone knows that there is only one winner in the Hunger Games and only the winner makes it out alive.

At first the book didn’t interest me, it just didn’t sound like my style of book. Boy was I wrong. The first 82 pages I read here and there but then things started to get really interesting and it became so engaging that I couldn’t put it down. There was almost non-stop action and every chapter was an intense cliff-hanger. After being home sick for a couple of days and reading this nearly non-stop, my first day back all I could think about was getting home to finish reading this book.

I think this book could spark some really interesting discussions amongst teens and adults about what our ideas of “entertainment.”

(image from Goodreads)