Just finished reading The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. Overall, an impressive piece of work, and I can see why the trilogy has been such a hit. It says “teen” on the cover and I think I read somewhere (on the web) that it’s aimed at 12 year-olds and up. That sounds about right. On the other hand, it’s classified as “Young Adult” in the library. Now, this has me confused, as I thought Young Adult meant 14 year-olds and up.
I made the mistake of reading the third book “Mockingjay” first and it made no sense as a stand alone.
The Hunger Games is written entirely in the first person and in the present tense. An awful lot of recently published books use the present tense to give an immediacy to the text and heighten tension, I suppose. But I find it distracting. I spotted just a couple of typos, and one of these was where the past tense crept in by mistake. The way that it leapt off the page at me demonstrated just how conscious I was of the tense all the time that I was reading.
I thought the section in the early middle part of the book a tad boring, and that it could have been shortened. To be fair, a lot of this concerned fashions, hair dressing and so forth – not a great area for me. Still, the book ran to 454 pages, and could have been trimmed a bit, IMO.
