A week ago I finished this three-book series that puts so many other books I have enjoyed to shame. I am not one to pick up YA(young adult) books off the shelves I pass by in cyber space and the covers of the books were so understated that I passed them three times a day for a whole month before downloading the first book. I am not sure if these books were properly labeled by Goodreads because labeling this series as a YA read would be a total understatement and would simply be selling it short. From my short experience with YA books, I see that books that fit the bill describe the protagonist’s journey as a coming of age; shallow or not-very-shallow experiences with responsibility, peer pressure, boys and sex in increasing order. Needless to say I wasn’t very impressed and our relationship was a fleeting thing. Katniss and her friends in this book regardless their age are literally young adults. And by that I don’t mean it to describe coming of age I mean young people who have been forced by life’s circumstances to act like adults. The setting is in a greatly unjust world where thirteen sectors strive and starve and a Capitol –more like a capital to that world- where rich people engorge themselves with delicacies they take from the other sectors. It’s already been seventy four years since the revolution in the poor districts and the children are still paying for their ancestors’ dream of freedom and equality. Every year, the president in the capitol reminds them that he still controls not only their livelihood but their lives as well when from each district a boy and a girl are chosen via lottery to battle against each other in a constructed arena to the death. There will be only one victor who will receive riches he can only dream of and his district will be rewarded as well with extra rations of food that year.
Katniss is the “man of the family” after her father died in a mining accident when she was twelve. She does illegal poaching in the capitol’s woods and trading in the black market so her depressed mother and young sister do not starve to death. On the year he sister’s name goes in the lottery for the first time her sister is picked and she decides to go in her stead. The boy picked that year is the baker’s son who saved her and her family from starvation the year her father dies. Only one of them will be allowed to come back, this is the boy she will have to kill to get back to her family. Things don’t turn out the way they are expected to in the two remaining books that follow.
If there is something I know about myself, it is that I am not quick on the waterworks, but so many times I found myself tearing up and towards the last chapter and epilogue I found myself flat out bawling. It’s a deep story that grips your heart making it expand at times and squeezes it making your soul contract at other times. This series knows how to end, it might not be what you wished for, but unlike other books that leave an open ending for writers who don’t know when to stop expanding on the characters and plots the series end at three.
This is an excerpt of the epilogue of the last book of the series
My children, who don't know they play on a graveyard.
Peeta says it will be okay. We have each other. And the book. We can make them understand in a way that will make them braver. But one day I'll have to explain about my nightmares. Why they came. Why they won't ever really go away.
I'll tell them how I survive it. I'll tell them that on bad mornings, it feels impossible to take pleasure in anything because I'm afraid it could be taken away. That's when I make a list in my head of every act of goodness I've seen someone do. It's like a game. Repetitive. Even a little tedious after more than twenty years.
But there are much worse games to play.
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