I had never heard of the book called The Hunger Games until last November. I became aware of the book when I started my Christmas shopping. The book was written by Suzanne Collins and published in 2008. It was followed by Catching Fire in 2009 and and Mockingjay in 2011 to complete the trilogy. Attention to the books seems to have grown as the movie version of The Hunger Games in March approaches.
Biographical information about the author is not easy to come by. The Wikipedia article, linked above, is very brief and the bio on her website has little more than this
Since 1991, Suzanne Collins has been busy writing for children’s television. She has worked on the staffs of several Nickelodeon shows, including the Emmy-nominated hit Clarissa Explains it All and The Mystery Files of Shelby Woo. For preschool viewers, she penned multiple stories for the Emmy-nominated Little Bear and Oswald. She also co-wrote the critically acclaimed Rankin/Bass Christmas special, Santa, Baby! Most recently she was the Head Writer for Scholastic Entertainment’s Clifford’s Puppy Days.
These books likely flew under my radar bacause my kids are college-age and Scholastic Book Fairs are no longer part of our world. Scholastic itself is the publisher of the books.
An April 11, 2011 New York Times article by Susan Dominus provides much more background on Collins than either Wikipedia or Collins's own website.
Collins’s move from writing about an oversize red dog to writing about weaponry and military strategy may seem unexpected, but she was falling back on years of informal schooling on the subject of war. Her grandfather was gassed in World War I, and her uncle sustained shrapnel wounds in World War II. Some of Collins’s earliest memories are of young men in uniform drilling at West Point, where her father, who later made lieutenant colonel, was on loan from the Air Force, teaching military history.
In 1968 the family moved to Indiana. It was the year Collins turned 6. It was also the year her father left to serve in Vietnam. War was a favorite topic for her father; and war, she understood at a young age, determined her family’s fate. “If your parent is deployed and you are that young, you spend the whole time wondering where they are and waiting for them to come home,” she said. “As time passes and the absence is longer and longer, you become more and more concerned — but you don’t really have the words to express your concern. There’s only this continued absence.”
This article also goes on to explain more about the potential lessons about war for children. Helping young people become more aware of the realities of war, in appropriate ways, is certainly a goal I would support.
The books are reasonably well written and sometimes interesting. The main character, Katniss Everdeen, is a PG-rated, non-technological Lisbeth Salander living in District 12 of the dystopian world called Panem. There is enough about District 12 in the first book to identify it as Appalachia. Young female readers may still be searching for their gender's equivalent of harry Potter or Frodo Baggins, and they may find her in Katniss.
The problem, for me, is that the villain in the story is a totalitarian, socialist government. Of all the things that separate progressives from conservatives in modern America, perhaps the biggest issue is whether big government or big business poses the greater threat to human freedom and well-being. True, there are some conservatives who want a huge government. Perhaps the clearest example is Rick Santorum, who supports a massive government which makes and enforces every moral decision for its citizens. Like Santorum , most of these figures disguise their big-government vision by having it provide almost no services or regulation of business.
I will confess that I have read the first two books, so far, and not the third. Perhaps there is more explanation of how Panem became what it is in the third book, but so far their are only vague hints at government plots to control uprisings among the common people.
I would be very interested to read other reactions, including interpretations that may be quite different from mine.