Book Club: The Hunger Games

Sparklers, I just finished The Hunger Games, and hoo boy, now I get what all the fuss is about.

Here are the Top 7 Reasons I Loved This Book. Read my list and then add your own items in the comments!

1. Katniss kicks a**. She's tough, she's brave, she's a little hardened, and she kills rabbits by shooting them clean through the eye. We need more female protagonists like this—especially in books that, like The Hunger Games, are essentially long movie treatments. Manohla Dargis is right: Hollywood doesn't make movies for or about smart women, and Katniss is a clever, tough girl in a book that was always intended to be turned into a movie.

2. The plot is as tight as a drum. I don't know how Suzanne Collins planned out this novel—index cards? An intricate outline in sixteen different colors of ink? Post-Its all over her living room walls? No planning at all, followed by compulsive rewriting?—but I'd pay big money to find out.

3. It's about the horror of reality TV. In Collins's fictional future, teenagers are forced to kill each other on a reality TV show. Collins is asking us to recognize how plausible this scenario is. In 2010, producers film desperate drug addicts and mentally ill hoarders for our entertainment; VH1 came within a few weeks of broadcasting a show starring a murderer. The Hunger Games wants us to think about the logical extension of our interest in watching people suffer.

I do wonder if Collins goes too easy on viewers and, by extension, readers. In her novel, the bad guys are 1) the government, which mandates this reality show, and 2) the residents of the richest district, who are pampered and clueless, and whose children are trained from birth to win the Hunger Games. Collins doesn't blame the residents of the poorer districts—but shouldn't she? After all, if they refused to watch the show, it would cease to be a powerful means of intimidation. And shouldn't we, the readers, feel guilty about enjoying the spectacle? We're just as enraptured as the fictional people watching at home, and I don't think Collins hits that point hard enough, or at all.

4. I hardly mind that Collins cheats. Katniss never makes a hard choice. She kills either monsters (Cato) or faceless characters we don't know and don't care about (everyone who dies in the tracker jacker attack). And that's not interesting. If Collins truly wanted us to think about what it means to live in a society in which the government forces teenagers to hang out for a week and then kill each other, she should have shown us what it's like to murder someone you know and like—or what it's like to murder someone face to face, rather than from a tree. She never puts Katniss in real moral danger, and that's the worst kind of cheating. But I don't really care! Collins won me over completely with her plotting, her pacing, and her genius for getting Katniss into jams.

5. It made me cry. I teared up during the District's three-fingered farewell to Katniss, the flowery funeral (I'm speaking in euphemisms to avoid spoilers), and the delivery of bread. Yes, I had a fever, so I wasn't quite in my right mind, but still! You cried too, right?

6. Peeta is the guy you WANT to love, but just don't. We've all dated (and if you haven't, you will, I promise) someone who's good-looking, kind, interesting, and desperately in love with us—and boring. Much as we try, we can't return this person's affections. Peeta is that guy for Katniss. Just as I would in real life, I alternated between thinking, "Come on, Kat, what's the problem? He saved your life and he's cute!" and "I miss Gale. He's gonna be so mad when he sees them kissing. I wonder how tall he is?"

7. We get some girly stuff. The fiery gown! The chariot ride! The adoring audience! The magical skin healing! Collins understands that while we want to see Katniss bleeding, panting through smoky air, or hiding in a tree, we also need to see her sporting the best manicure of all time, if only for a few pages. She gets that the world isn't divided into girls who play rugby and girls who use cuticle cream. It should go without saying that toughness and femininity can exist in the same person, but pop culture hardly ever allows for that degree of complexity. It's nice to see it in such a wildly successful novel.

OK, now I want to hear what you think!! Why do you love The Hunger Games?

To ask me a question about grammar, or to tell me about your favorite book, email missmarm@sparknotes.com.