President Snow said, “hope is the only thing stronger than fear”.  In this scene from the film he says this while tending white roses in his garden. Note that unlike the people in the districts that he has the freedom to garden. In his life he has the freedom to enjoy life’s possibilities for abundance and beauty.

We were talking about the controversy about some of the movie’s casting decisions today so you may find this article at Jezebel interesting.

A Character-By-Character Guide to Race in The Hunger Games

Suzanne Collins’s book The Hunger Games deals with a dystopian society, and takes place in the fictional nation of Panem. Panem — most likely derived from the Latin phrase panem et circenses, which literally translates into “bread and circuses” — exists in the same geographical space as the current boundaries of North America, but was established following the destruction of modern civilization. (You’ll also notice that many characters have Roman names.) This futuristic country is not all-white. It is diverse; there are many skin colors and hair colors, and in The Capitol, citizens dye their skin, and use surgery to alter their features.

While some fans were shocked to discover that black actors were chosen to play the characters Cinna, Rue and Thresh, they should not have been: It’s all right there in the books. Suzanne Collins very specifically described a world in which the blonde people were wealthy and the olive-skinned and brown people were poor. Race was built into the structure of the novels, and those who “skipped over” the part about Rue and Thresh having dark skin missed a huge part of the story.

Read more about the characters here.

Travis Prinzi believes that at the heart of The Hunger Games is the victory of imagination over the power of tyranny. As our over-arching theme this year is Power and Control, Prinzi’s blog entry on Power and Imagination is a very interesting read. Check it out!

I have pointed students towards this 2010 article in The New Yorker before but it is worth posting about again. We have been discusses dystopian fiction in class and this article discussing examples written for the young adult reader.

Rebecca Stead chose to set her children’s novel “When You Reach Me”—winner of the 2010 Newbery Medal—in nineteen-seventies New York partly because that’s where she grew up, but also, as she told one interviewer, because she wanted “to show a world of kids with a great deal of autonomy.” Her characters, middle-class middle-school students, routinely walk around the Upper West Side by themselves, a rare freedom in today’s city, despite a significant drop in New York’s crime rate since Stead’s footloose youth. The world of our hovered-over teens and preteens may be safer, but it’s also less conducive to adventure, and therefore to adventure stories.

Perhaps that’s why so many of them are reading “The Hunger Games,” a trilogy of novels by Suzanne Collins, which take place at an unspecified time in North America’s future. Her heroine, Katniss Everdeen, lives in one of twelve numbered districts dominated by a decadent, exploitative central city called the Capitol.

Read more here.

Are very own astronaut Toby was on The Erin Simpson Show today to talk about what she got up to at space camp last year. It is a fantastic clip and Toby does the school proud. Catch her here.

Readers might have to shelve plans to borrow a copy of post-apocalyptic teen novel The Hunger Games from Auckland libraries – there are 2610 people in the queue to borrow it.

The book, by American Suzanne Collins, heads a list of the most requested titles. Even with 229 copies available and four more on order, readers are waiting up to three months for a copy, Auckland Libraries regional resources manager Louise LaHatte said.

In the capital 226 people are queuing for city libraries’ 51 copies and in Christchurch 365 people are waiting for 75 books.

The Guardian has a piece on Hunger Games writer Suzanne Collins:

There are many bestselling children’s authors but only rarely do any come along who break through into the universal cultural consciousness. CS Lewis did it, as did Roald Dahl and JK Rowling. Now along comes Suzanne Collins, a 49-year-old from Connecticut, in the US, with The Hunger Games trilogy.

It’s too early to know how durable this series will prove, but the signs so far are good. It has spent more than 100 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. The film has made converts of even the most curmudgeonly critics, grossing more than $531m (£327m) worldwide in its first four weeks. More than 1m copies of the books are now in print in the UK, and last month Amazon announced that Collins had become the bestselling Kindle author so far.

The woman behind the phenomenon is a bit of a mystery. Collins wrote for children’s TV before turning to novels. She co-wrote the screenplay of The Hunger Games and is married to a TV actor – so knows a bit about the media circus – but she doesn’t do publicity, hasn’t even met her UK publishers, and seemed to tread the red carpet reluctantly at the film’s Los Angeles premiere.

On her website, she is photographed in Central Park in New York, nose to snout with a toy rat, her long hair flowing witchily around her. “If you’ve read my fantasy series, The Underland Chronicles, you will have a clue as to why I chose this photo,” she writes, offering no help to any visiting Hunger Games fan who had imagined her refulgent in a flaming robe.

Read the rest here.