The Hunger Games Trilogy

I like it very, very much.

The Hunger Games trilogy is an exciting, easy-to-read story. It's full of suspense at nearly every page. Scenes flow into one another. Words bring the images to mind easily. And although the proofreader in me felt there was some improvement that can be done to the punctuation and sentence structure (seriously! Don't know if it's just me, but I actually had to reread several sentences to understand what the author was trying to say), I couldn't put it down, finishing 3 books in 5 days. It felt like I had 2 jobs - my normal job in the morning until evening, and the other in the evening till midnight, reading those 3 books. Devouring them, really.

Yet, initially, I didn't find anything special about this series. Sure, it was an exciting adventure tale, but it was nothing like the literary books I'd become used to reading. "Maybe I've grown stupid," I thought, "brains gone rusty from the lack of use, to be unable to find embedded meanings within the pages, other than the few obvious ones." Actually, I still think this is utterly possible, but it's not the point of this post. So yes, I didn't find the book especially special, though it kept me riveted to its pages until after midnight, when I really should be sleeping, to the last page when tears burst forth from me, which isn't unusual by the way because I cry at nearly every sad story.

Then after I'd closed the back cover of the last book, the question, "What is the point of this story?" popped into my head. Surely, it can't be just a simple tale. Maybe I'm simply putting too much meaning into the story, being one of those literary critics (only that I'm not) who put words into the author's mouth, inserting meaning into words which weren't meant to be there in the first place, reading too far between the lines. But in any case, I read the author's words at the end of the trilogy, trying to find out where she got the inspiration for this book from.

For me there's just one very simple thing which stood out - it's war. It's war, hurt, trauma, peace, power... It may well be just a cursory look at what goes on during a war, the damage it does to people emotionally and the scars they carry with them the rest of their lives.

I feel sadness, and I start reading it from page 1 again.