Sorry about the lack of posts lately; I haven’t been in a writing mood for some reason. I do have quite a list of things to blog about now though.

One of the gifts I received for Christmas this year was a box set of The Hunger Games Trilogy Box Set by Suzanne Collins given to me by my brothers girlfriend Holly.

I didn’t get a chance to start into it until this past week, however when I did get to it, the result was about 2 hours of sleep a night for three days.

They are wonderful stories. The best answer I could give for “What are these books like?” would be, I suppose, a cross between Battle Royale and The White Mountains (How is that series not in print any more?!). The basic premise is a story about a girl in a post-apocalyptic north American society which has reverted to a form of totalitarian Roman government in which districts send representatives under the age of 17 (I think) each year to an arena to fight to the death. One oddity I found about it is the narrative is written in first person present tense… which was strange at first, but I got used to it fairly quickly. There is some teenage angst from the lead character, however it doesn’t come close to Twilight cheese.

The series is flagged as Young Adult, however there is a lot of violence, as one would imagine from a story about kids killing each other.

It’s not a perfect book, but the narrative is superb and as evidenced from my lack of sleep, holds the reader. The only major fault I had with the plot was that, in my opinion, a society that had all the amazing technology that they employed in the arenas to kill these kids would have no trouble with automated systems and environmental tech to perform the jobs of the outlying suppressed districts. For example, there’s a district for growing and harvesting grain, an activity which even at our current level of technology is mostly automated. But as I said, this is forgivable and the story holds even with some logical flaws.

I must admit that I hated the ending. Don’t get me wrong, it was a good ending, I just didn’t like it. 🙂

It’s not a difficult read and I would highly recommend it. You could chew through each book in a few evenings at a leisurely pace.