Category Archives: The Hunger Games

Racial Games

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.

Fresh Hell – What’s behind the boom in dystopian fiction for young readers?

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.

Library readers hunger for hit book

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.

 Read more here.

Suzanne Collins: Hunger Games author who found rich pickings in dystopia

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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.

Exam hunger for dark themes

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In today’s paper there was an article about The Hunger Games and how it was being used as an NCEA text:

Teachers are encouraging pupils to study the popular novel The Hunger Games in preparation for their NCEA exams.

At least four secondary schools taught the controversial post-apocalyptic book last year, and exam moderators find it one of the most popular essay topics for Level One English students.

The book is now on the recommended reading list, alongside vampire series Twilight and the Harry Potter books.

The Hunger Games, the first of a trilogy, is a dystopian thriller, set in a metropolitan capital city that holds the rest of the nation to ransom. The “games” involve 24 children – including 16-year-old heroine Katniss – fighting to the death in a reality show.

In the US, the trilogy is third on the American Library Association list of most frequently challenged books, but its popularity in schools here has been welcomed.

“I think it could be quite a good idea,” said Massey University education and literary professor Tom Nicholson. “It might be controversial, but to me it’s been phenomenally successful as a good read – and anything that gets teenagers reading is good.”

Read more here.

Antidote to Cynicism? Analyzing The Hunger Games

Some more reading on The Hunger Games film. This is from Logan Nakyanzi Pollard at The Huffington Post.

The Hunger Games, directed by Gary Ross, made some $155 million opening weekend, and if you’re among the few who haven’t seen it yet, stop reading here.

This is one of those old school essays I used to write, not as a critic, but just because it’s important to write about things — to look at them and try to understand them. I’m telling you this because Hunger’s got a rich subtext, it’s a kind of movie-within-a-movie, which may explain its success and wide appeal.

For some, “IT’S THE NEW TWILIGHT!” And by that I’m assuming the ticket master is referring to the gaggle of teens bouncing around the lobby waiting for the movie to begin. This film is based on the first in a trilogy of best-selling books by Suzanne Collins and has a strong teeny-bopper protagonist, who like-totally-loves two nice boys from her town, and like Twilight’s Bella, has to find her way in the world with derring-do.

But this is no Twilight.

It’s one of the toughest satires of modern culture I’ve seen in awhile. It made me think of Series 7 and Logan’s Run and other films, like 1984 and A Clockwork Orange… and like those movies, I felt sad watching them, even as I was moved by the effectiveness of the storytelling.

Read the rest here.

The Hunger Names

When I first read The Hunger Games I was struck by Suzanne Collins choice of names … and not in a good way. Katniss particularly bothered me as a choice of name for the lead character, it just didn’t do her justice. Now I know I’m not alone in my concerns about the names in the books and I found this article by Miriam Krule over at Slate worth reading.

There are many shocking elements in The Hunger Games, the dystopic young adult series by Suzanne Collins—it is, after all, about kids killing each other. Once you let that sink in, though, you can absorb the craziest part of the trilogy: the characters’ names. Katniss? Haymitch? Cinna? Collins has never explained how she came up with these names, leaving the books’ many fans to hatch their own theories. (One fansite even created an algorithm to figure out your Hunger Games name; mine is Rebmet G. Skiptulip, only slightly more ridiculous-sounding than any of the ones in the book.)

The names can be roughly divided into two groups: Characters from the poor, depleted districts are named after plants or other earthy items; those from the regal capital have a Roman influence. While the names may seem as random as the reaping, I think there’s order in them: The Roman-themed names play on Collins’ critique of imperialism—the nation of Panem gets its name from panem et circenses, or “bread and circuses”—while the plant names highlight the natural goodness of the books’ heroes.

Katniss Everdeen: The heroine of the trilogy has what seems, at first, like a not-so-heroic moniker. (Her best friend, Gale, calls her Catnip.) But her name is one of the few that gets an explanation: In a flashback, her father—who is already dead when the book begins—tells her that “as long as you can find yourself, you’ll never starve.” The katniss plant has nourishing roots, and is also known as “arrowhead.” It belongs to the genus Sagittaria, and the constellation of the same name, Sagittarius, is also known as the archer—a fitting ode to her impressive bow-and-arrow skills.

Read the rest here.

By the way if you want to find out your Hunger Games name – go here.