374 pages
Published 2008
Read from September 16 to September 17
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
One of the most interesting questions in current pop literature is, how does a book series become a craze? Publishers, I'm sure, want to know how to bottle phenomenal, irrational popularity into a patent formula. I want to know how it occurs because I think it's a fascinating sociological question. I know that once a series reaches sufficient media saturation to intrude upon the awareness of people who don't read habitually, the Facebook-of-your-aunt threshold perhaps, super-bestsellerdom is inevitable. The question is, how does any particular series reach that point? Advertising and media campaigns have a lot to do with it, of course, but if that were all there were to it, every publishing house would churn out half a dozen crazy-fan series every year. Is there an additional common ingredient, or is it all just fad and happenstance? Luck, even?
Before now, my only personal exposure to fan-craze fiction was the Harry Potter series. When I finally got into the series around 2004, I found the first installment only mildly entertaining, but by the third book I was wholly invested. No sense of "fan community" was involved in the process for me; I didn't even go to a release party until Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and I never had anything to do with fan message boards or anything like that. What got me hooked, I think, was the world J. K. Rowling built around and beyond Hogwarts, the mix of punning whimsy and moderately creepy folklore from around Western Europe, and to a lesser degree a fondness for the large supporting cast (though The Order of the Phoenix did its very best to make me hate all those adolescent little shits). But I've always been a sucker for excellent worldbuilding. That's all that kept me reading the Dark Tower series, after all, once Stephen King got off the drugs and his storytelling went off the rails.
I didn't know what to expect going into The Hunger Games, aside from a general sense of post-apocalyptic Carousel shenanigans, a strong female lead, and a multiethnic supporting cast that much of its online fanbase assumed was lily-white. After reading a bunch of juvenile fic this year, much of it centered on strong female leads and a lot of it set in fantasy universes, I was curious to pinpoint the je ne sais quoi that propelled this book into stratospheric bestsellerdom while the likes of, say, Summer and Bird languish in more typical habitual-readers-only obscurity.
Massive spoilers follow. Don't read on unless you've already read The Hunger Games, don't plan on reading it, or otherwise don't care about massive spoilers.
On one hand, with the exception of the faked-for-reality-TV-audiences romance (which I knew to expect because you can't spend time on the internet without absorbing super-fan-series plot details through osmosis), every beat of the story was predictable. The strong female protagonist was not merely a strong female protagonist; she was orphaned by her father and estranged from her mother, and had to take care of her little sister! The society paired your bog-standard post-apocalyptic survival town with your typical decadent 1970s technological-dystopia-with-a-human-sacrifice-fixation, right on down to the impractical "futuristic" fashions in the capital and the country's stupid portmanteau name. I knew from the moment Katniss didn't obtain the bow and arrows from Cornucopia, she would get them by eliminating another tribute. I knew from the moment she made a friend, that friend would have to die in a melodramatic turning point. Once Rue died, I knew Thresh would emerge at some point and refrain from killing Katniss out of noble gratitude. I knew Peeta was only with the Careers to give Katniss a chance. I knew something would happen to make them think they both could win. When the "rule change" was announced, I knew it would be revoked at the last minute, when just the two of them were left. And so on and so forth.
On the other hand, all those predictable beats were hit in an extremely satisfying, entertaining way. And after Rue died, and Katniss received the gift of bread from District 11, I was unexpectedly moved, considering Rue as a character was only on-screen for, what, two chapters? (Also, anyone who thought Rue wasn't black was a goddamn idiot; it's completely blatant in the text.) Even something that should have annoyed me, the on-the-nose naming of the characters, didn't bother me too much; I was too amused by the aptness of naming the main villain Cato that I forgave the rest. All in all The Hunger Games was well-executed popcorn sci-fi, and I'm moderately interested to see the inevitable fight to take down
Nothing in this book, though, really made it clear to me why The Hunger Games, and not any of a hundred other series, took off the way it did. Maybe I'm just not predisposed to fannishness in general, and that blinkers me where these books are concerned. At least, unlike Twilight, it's a genuinely good read with a positive message to chew over.
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